From Lijiang, Shangri-La is a 5 hour bus drive away to the north east, very close to Tibet. The place is actually under Tibetan authority and every inscription is both in Mandarin and Tibetan. As we came to say, Shangri-La is “as close as you can get to Tibet without getting your nose cold”, nor a permit.
We got there in the late afternoon to discover that our hostel had cancelled our reservations, so we decided to walk around in the old city until we found a place to stay. We ran into an old inn that looked really cozy and decided we would spend the night there. The owners were really friendly and enjoyed talking to Jake in Chinese and who also helped us a lot with getting around places.
The old town of Shangri-La was quite similar to the old city of Lijiang, but much smaller. The narrow streets lead to a central square that was packed with street food vendors in the morning and where people gathered for line dancing in the evening.
The biggest attraction of Shangri-La is definitely the Songzanlin Monastery, built in the 17th century and located about 3km away from the old city. It is Tibetan in architecture and essence and embodies the core of the Tibetan Buddhist culture. We walked around the monastery and the little village at its base for half a day, and also received blessings from the monks (the blessing were accompanied by a wooden bracelet and a colorful thread necklace). The weather was really capricious, it was clouded and rained most of the time, and at times it got really cold and windy.
Unfortunately, the central body of the monastery was under reconstruction.
This reminded me a lot of the Chinese Pavilion at the World Expo.
Stupas, Buddhist structures that contain relicts, are everywhere around the place.
We got back in town in the afternoon and discovered the entire old city was still out of electricity. Luckily it wasn’t raining anymore, so we went out exploring the old city and climbed the interminable steps to a Buddhist temple from where we got an amazing view.
The minority ladies were kind enough to let us take a picture.
The power outage lasted for at least 12 hours, which meant that we had dinner at candle light. Jake spotted a Nepalese restaurant where we had a very delicious, but quite unusual dinner: Indian food eaten with chopsticks.
Another remarkable attraction around the city is the Pudacuo National Park, a reserve over 1200 sq km at 3500m above sea level. The administration of the park has a very well organized system of getting around: they provide buses that stop in designated spots and they drop you off at the next viewpoint. We spent a whole day visiting and the whole time I could not stop but think how amazing it is that there are still places like that left in the world: it’s all green, the water is crystal clear and the skies show no signs of pollution.
It is impossible to talk about Shangri-La without mentioning the Tibetan food – by far my favorite of all the things I tried in China. We tried many yak specialties, the famous Tibetan yak dumplings (called momos), had yak cheese balls with sweet sauce and even felt adventurous enough as to try the yak butter tea. It’s all about the yaks in Tibet!
My initial image of Shangri-La was probably affected by Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon”, in which he presents it as an earthly paradise isolated from the rest of the world. What I discovered was quite different; it had many of the modern facilities: electrically heated beds, ATMs, full phone service and decent infrastructure. Even the monks used cell phones and ads for China Mobile and Coca-Cola where inside the monastery. While I had wished to find my Shangri-La, the real Shangri-La taught me that it is impossible not to be touched by development and is unfair to pretend these places should keep their old lifestyle – it’s normal that they want the benefits of progress as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment