Shangrila,Tibetan monastery and Shuhe village

The place we were really looking forward to visit in China was Shangrila, and after finishing our 2-day hike in the Tiger Leaping Gorge, we were finally taking a bus to go there. 

The road was going up all the way because Shangrila is situated at 3,200 meter a.s.l. And the views were fantastic!

Tibetan influence is very strong here. Almost all the buildings are built in a style similar to the one used to build monasteries in Tibet. This is a local university, which is huge - about 15 buildings!

Mixture of Chinese and Tibetan.

The bus dropped us of at Tina's guesthouse (besides in Tiger Leaping Gorge, they have another one in Shangrila), somewhere on one of the main streets. 

We pre-booked a guesthouse in the old town, and tried to hail a taxi to get there. When we showed the first taxi driver the address written in the booking confirmation, he started to wave at us saying "no,no" and drove away. The second and the third ones did exactly the same. We couldn't understand what was going on and decided to at least start walking towards the direction of the old town and try to hail another taxi on the way.  

Another 2-3 attempts to get the stupid taxi failed miserably. At first we thought that the old town is too close to where we were, and they didn't want to bother, but then I checked the GPS and it was quite far away... 

And then it occurred to us - they CANNOT READ!! Apparently, lot's of people here are illiterate, and they just couldn't read the address we were showing. We didn't know what to do, but then we caught a break and a taxi driver who stopped, knew how to read and gave us a ride. 

Unfortunately, that wasn't the last problem of the day. When we finally got to the guesthouse, we found out that it was closed down. We still tried bunging on the door for a while, but it was obvious - the building was abandoned... One of the locals, who AMAZINGLY spoke good English explained that because of the ongoing construction works, the whole street has no water and the buildings were shut down for some time already and there is no way the guesthouse will be working in any foreseeable future... GREAT, that was all we needed.

But then the Tibetan Gods decided that we had enough. A couple of German tourists passing by told us that there are some open guesthouses in the area where they were staying, and we might find something for the night. We followed them and tried to negotiate the room where they were staying. Hotel's lobby - nice and warm)) 

It was still too expensive, so we found anther rooms just a few meters down the street.

After the hike, the bus ride, the walk trying to get a taxi and the whole guesthouse disaster, we were VERY hungry, so we just drooped the bags in the room and went out for dinner.

We didn't want to go far, so we found a cozy little place around the corner, with a great choice of local foods. Because it was so cold, we all chose soup, which was exactly like "beshbarmak" - a traditional dish that we also have in Kazakhstan.

After dinner we went straight to bed. 

In the middle of the night I got a mild case of altitude sickness, as I woke up very thirsty and running a small fever. Luckily, it only lasted for an hour or so and then disappeared.

P.S. Thank God in Shangrila they have electric warming beds, when we checked the temperature, it was -3!!

The next morning, when we woke up, the temperature was still -1, so we put on all the clothes we had with us and went outside to get some breakfast and to see what we came for - the Tibetan monastery of Shangrila.

The old town here was destroyed by fire in January 2014, all the old building were burned to the ground because they were all made of wood. And although we were hoping that they already finished re-building the place, we were wrong. Most of the streets here still look like this:

They did managed to re-build some of the building, though.

And some are even open for business already.

Because of the fire, very little tourists still come here, so it's difficult to find a place to eat as well. We managed to find one after all, where we were the only people, but the breakfast was great - local pie with yak meat.))

There was a shop right next to the place where we ate, selling skins of different animals, mostly dogs, and somebody joked that probably what we ate just now wasn't at all yak meat, considering the number of dog skins available.. :-0 

And they make children jackets from what looks a lot like cats... 

Anyway, because there was nothing to see of the old town, for now, the only reason why people come here is to see the Tibetan monastery, as mentioned already. It's on the outskirts of the new town and we went to the main square to get a taxi, hoping to find one with at least a literate driver, and with some luck, the one who speaks English. 

The one we found didn't spoke the word of English, but had a magical phone number of someone, who did, and whenever he needed to explain something difficult, he would call, and the voice on the other end would explain. Very handy )))

We were generally very impressed by the town, as it was very clean, had wide streets, and looked very well taken care off - no dirty old buildings, or slumps. 

Yak

After a 15 minute ride, our taxi guy turned and stopped at a huge parking lot near what looked like some government building. He was trying to explain something to us, but we couldn't understand why he just doesn't drive to the monastery. 
He called the magic number and the voice in English explained, that you can't just drive to the monastery, you have to buy a ticket, get on a bus provided, and then you will be brought to the monastery's main gate. 
We bought our tickets and got on the bus. Another 10 minutes and we already could see the monastery at the turn of the road, surrounded by a bunch of tiny local houses.

A together pic before going in. The weather by the way was absolutely gorgeously perfect, despite the cold.

As usual somebody in local clothes was selling some local food nobody bought.

The main gate already is quite impressive.

In front of the gate there is a small lake with a couple of pagodas.

There are several temples on different levels, all being used for various ceremonies. We went to the side ones first, before going up the stairs to the main ones.

The main street

A blessing from a local monk.

Despite being a monastery, the place had CCTV and signs everywhere (both Chinese and English) , which for me was a little strange and felt a little fake.

On the top there are 3 main temples, at least that is what we thought.

And the golden house on top of the central one, that is where the Lama is residing. Of course, as a tourist, you can't go in.

When we went in, there was a ceremony taking place and the entrance was closed with a curtain, but you could still see over it. The space was filled with rows of monks, some in special ropes, and the rest in simple ones. 
There was a monk, walking along the curtain on the other side, and whenever he saw a camera, he would try to hit it with a wooden stick. Luckily, he didn't get to mine))

Not all of the monks were at the ceremony, there were many of them outside as well.

One of the upper temples, where the sleeping quarters of the monks are. 

Every temple has multiple Buddha statutues, some really huge.

Somehow I thought that the monks will be very serious and praying non-stop, but here they seemed to have lot's of fun. 

This place is extremely photogenic, especially with sunny weather. The contrasts are just awesome. 

One last pic before leaving))

When we got back to town, we needed to get some lunch, before getting on a bus back to Lijiang. At this point everyone was a bit tired of eating Chinese, so we happily settled for a burger with a local twist - called "a flying yak burger", no less. 

Back at the guesthouse, we picked up our bags and went to the bus station. Only when we were leaving, I noticed that our guesthouse was quite cool looking))

Since we constantly had difficulty explaining things in English, we didn't expect much from the local bus station and asked the girl at the burger bar, who did speak English, to write a phrase "bus ticket to Lijiang" in Chinese. We were pleasantly surprised that the lady in the ticket window did speak a bit of English and we got our tickets on the next available bus. 

4 hours later we got back to Lijiang, but this time we stayed in a small nearby village called Shuhe.
The village is as old as the ancient town of Lijiang, but much quieter. Another big difference was that people actually still live here, inside the old houses, while in Lijiang, the houses almost exclusively are being used as shopping space. 
We got in very late and went straight to bed after dinner. 
The next morning it was cold and grey and we decided to stay in the village and make a relaxing day out of it. We just walked around all afternoon.

It really was a quite, nice town.

Just as in Lijiang, because we arrived very late, we didn't have to pay the entrance fee. The next day we had to keep in mind not accidentally wonder outside the town walls.

It was a saturday, so lot's of weddings around.

They too participate in one of the weddings.

Local crafts

Almost every bar/restaurant has it's own life music.

This was our last day in China.
In the evening we flew to Jinghong, near the Southern border with Laos, where we were planning to take the bus and cross the border to Laos. 

Conclusions on China:
Kunming can easily be avoided, unless it's needed, like in our case.
Dali was nice and we loved going on the motorbikes to the lake. 
Lijiang is indeed old and interesting and definitely worth a visit.
Tiger Leaping gorge has fantastic nature and views, and should be on to do list.
Shangrila is still mostly one large construction site, but the Tibetan monastery is absolutely great and worth coming all the way up to 3,500 meter above sea level.
Shuhe is nice but after Lijiang it is much less impressive. 

Next: how we spent a week in Laos