Lijiang Day 3 (0421) - Hike to Lashihai

We woke up well rested after sleeping in the heated beds at the Ecolodge. Unfortunately I had not applied sunblock very well the day before and had two horn shaped burns on my face. The hike was much easier this day as we did not have to go up and down mountains quite so much. It was more of a straight shot to Lashihai, however it took the same amount of time, around 4.5 hours. It was amazing to see how dramatically the mountains changed as we hiked through them. The plant life varied so much between different altitudes and different sides of the mountains.

We passed this one lake on the way to Lashihai that had thousands of tadpoles right along the edge of the lake. The strange thing was that I didn't see many frogs. I don't know what happens once they grow into frogs, maybe the villagers eat them? That's one hell of a lot of frogs legs. We continued on and saw goats and cows feeding in the forests and then eventually made it to Lashihai where we stayed with Lily's family.

Lily's family lives at the top of the village, which I guess means they are doing pretty well. Their place was beautiful and had all kinds of flowers and vegetables growing. Their property was set up like others in the village, with three buildings facing each other like three sides of a square, and a courtyard in the middle. Each building is about the same, consisting of two floors, and no insulation. Lily's family had two guestrooms prepared on the second floor of one of the buildings. One room was to be the girls' and one was the boys'. Carrie and I ran up and like little kids we wanted to pick the better room for the girls. We were being so silly that we only noticed that one room had a square hole in the wall and the other had a closing window with glass. Naturally we decided that a room with a hole in the wall would be colder than the one with a window you can shut. Oh how wrong we were. Later that evening we noticed that there was no glass covering the holes in the one decorative wall in the room. So instead of one larger hole, we had an entire wall full of small holes that opened up to the balcony.

For lunch they fed us all kinds of treats. One of the stranger things was that they had apples from last year! Lily said that they put them under pine needles to preserve them. They looked just like regular apples, only slightly wrinkled.

After we ate, we walked around the village for a long time. We were invited to this one old couple's place to have some tea. They were a very cool old couple, but I couldn't help feeling a little sick every time I saw the old man stick his tongue through the gaps where his teeth had fallen out. They had dried a bunch of bean jelly (they make it gelatinous, but they also dry it and fry it), and then deep fried a whole mess for us. The first bite was ok, but I was getting tired of eating deep fried foods, so I tried to politely turn down anymore. Unfortunately they were very pushy and kept forcing us to take more.

We continued walking around town and went to visit the school. It was a very bizarre experience. Here was a fairly old looking town with cute homes, but nothing extravagant and then out of nowhere was this school that was all brand new with a very fancy entrance and amazing view (hard not to have an amazing view anywhere around Lijiang). We sort of suspected the Chinese government built it for some more devious reasons than just to give them a nice school. There were loads of children running around and as soon as they saw us with our cameras they would pose for photos. The weird thing was that every time I picked up my camera to take a photo, they would run away or reorganize themselves. It was like they were teasing me or something. The kids loved the immediate gratification of the digital camera because every time I took a photo, they would crowd around to see the photo and then pose for another shot.

That night we returned to Lily's family's place for dinner and then we got sucked into sitting in front of a TV watching some Naxi dancing/karaoke video until we went to sleep.