24th December: Lijiang, China
We had a very chilled morning here on Christmas Eve. For lunch, the buffet around the corner beckoned. As usual it was delicious! Kaja wasn’t feeling well, so went back to the room for a quiet day. The trip we had planned from Lijiang that she was least fussed about was to the First Bend in the Yangtze, so I went to try to make that happen. As usual when I head off by myself, I had done no real planning and flew by the seat of my pants.
As luck would have it, there was a bus due to leave from right outside the restaurant that went the 70km west to the village I wanted. I hopped on and it soon filled up with locals and their huge sacks of goods. The ever-visible Jade Dragon Snow Mountain loomed 50km north the entire journey, its 3,200-metre prominence peaking over forest and hills and dominating this part of Yunnan. After around 90 minutes and a descent of dozens of hairpins, I got off in the village of Shigu. I had about 3 hours until I thought the final bus went back.
As I climbed up through the old town, it was refreshingly unsanitised. People were going about their daily lives and shops catered to their needs and not to mass tourism. This is not a place with too many visitors, although the beginnings of this can be seen in places on the edges of town. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years it had all changed. As it happened, I’d climbed the wrong hill! It was really warm too and I’d been relentlessly delayering but was still too warm in a t-shirt. Another contrast with yesterday!
Back down in town, I decided to head to the river itself. Up close, the Jinsha (as the Yangtze is known in these upper reaches) was a deep blue and low in flow but still turbulent and powerful.
Having seen it up close, I wanted the view I’d come for. After a walk along the main road, I saw some steps up to a house and decided to investigate. Some enterprising locals had built these as a makeshift path up the steep hillside and charged a small amount for entry. I was happy to oblige and passed through their house and garden, past the chickens, and up the very steep steps. Eventually, there was a kind of platform where the vegetation, including cacti, had been cleared to red earth. I was as breathless as if I’d just ran up the hill and took a good few minutes to compose myself. Luckily, I had the view all to myself. From here, the waters looked more azure between the green mountains.
The reason I’d been so keen to see this incredible view for myself was the significance it has on human history in this part of the world. This is where the Yangtze turns 140 degrees from near-south to near-north in a vast horseshoe. Without this bend, China’s great river would instead flow into southeast Asia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the history of civilisation in Asia would be vastly different without this one geographically feature.
Additionally, over the hills to my west, two further great rivers flowed. This region, known as the Three Parallel Rivers, is where the Jinsha (Yangtze), Lancang (Mekong), and Nu (Salween) all flow side-by-side in parallel valleys. Slightly further west, the headwaters of the Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy also flow from these unique and biodiverse mountains. There can be nowhere else on earth like it.
Back in Shigu, a shopkeeper told me I’d just missed a bus but there was another in two and a half hours. He also said that minivans plied the route to Lijiang, so I tried my luck and within a few minutes had flagged down the Chinese version of a marshrutka. We took a different route to the bus, over a spectacular mountain pass with a lake visible in the foreground of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. After an hour, we were back in Lijiang. The minivan’s end point in this city with a spread-out population of 1.3 million people? Our hotel’s car park. Who needs to plan! To round the day off, we took a tomato-based hotpot each from the restaurant. Adding various mushrooms, tofu skin, and fragrant greens made for a delicious dinner. I even took the rare decision of trying the different cakes they had today.
