Day 14 (Lijiang)

Monday 16^th July: Lijiang J L

The Old Town of Lijiang looked appealing so that is where we were going to spend the day. After a good breakfast at the Maple Leaf Inn in Shuhe, we took a taxi for Lijiang. There, it was bustling with holidaymakers, coaches full of people. The old town is beautiful and definitely old. Built on a hill, the houses are cramped one against the other and the cobbled streets are not made for high heels.  We walked up and down the town, along its vivacious river and though we enjoyed the charming views and the architecture, the town is saturated with shops to the point of implosion that it left us with a bitter taste. Unlike Tongli, there was not one street with just abodes and residents. Lijiang Old Town has been developed and abused into a commercial circus. A true shame!

So, we shortened our stay and left for Baisha village after lunch. We’d read in the guide about it and thought it would be a good option for the afternoon. A driver took us there and as we were driving through the village where there was nothing this time but people, we realised it would be best to keep him and ask him to take us back to Shuhe rather than leave us with no other means of getting back but our feet. In fact, the attraction at Baisha is the frescoes a couple of kilometres out. However, the local government has enforced a protection fee on top of the ticket fee and although you pay it once only and it allows you to visit several sites, since we were leaving the following day and had no plans to go back to Lijiang, we didn’t see the point. We asked the driver to take us to a temple in the mountain instead, then back to Shuhe the “back way”.  The temple was beautiful. We had rarely seen such a large temple before with benches and adornments on every wall as well as the buddhas. The drive back down the mountain gave us a spectacular view of the valley. Once back, the driver kept saying we had arrived but we didn’t recognise where we were. Never mind! It looked like a nice walk and it was. I think we actually ended up in the old town of Shuhe. Where we are looks too new and has probably been built to attract tourists and coaches. We went back for dinner and had the best and our last hotpot in China.