Shangrila and Xiamen

Xiaoyu and I headed up to Shangrila with high expectations. It's supposed to have beautiful grasslands and mountains, and is about as close as we are getting to Tibet this year now that it's been closed off by the Chinese government. While there is Tibetan influences that can be seen, the Old Town was not particularly interesting. We went to a temple to visit what is the world's largest Tibetan Prayer wheel, and then visited a Tibetan Monastery - the largest in Yunnan. The monastery say atop a small hill overlooking a Tibetan village. It was extremely improverished but nevertheless quite a sight to behold. We visited the grasslands the next morning. Wild flowers bloomed everywhere. It was quite pretty but hot.

We decided against paying the exorbitant fee to visit a "national park" that was in the area. Instead, we hopped on a bus to Baishuitai, or White Water Terraces, natural terraces formed by mineral deposits over hundreds of years. The long bus ride wound through beautiful terrain with gorgeous terrace farms that sparkled green and yellow in the sun. Baisha, the closest town to the terraces, was so small you can barely call it a town. And they clearly did not get many visitors. We joined the only other visitors, 3 foreigners (2 American and 1 French student), stayed at a very simple guest house for the night, before climbing up to the terraces in the morning. Inadvertently, we went up the "illegal" path and got yelled at by the locals in charge when we came down.

We left Baishuitai for Haba, with the intention of hiking the snow mountains there but the rain led us to change our plans. We headed straight back to Lijiang where we just spent a quiet day and a half wandering the Old Town and relaxing.

We flew from Lijiang to Kunming the night of the 25th and stayed overnight in Kunming with Jessika, a Clinton Foundation doctor who used to live with me in Beijing. Early the next morning, I left for Xiamen, where I needed to go to catch my Cebu Pacific flight to the Philippines.

Xiamen is a port city close to Taiwan in Fujian Province in southern China. People there speak a dialect very similar to Taiwanese and the food is very similar too. After spending a bit of time at an internet cafe, I spent several hours walking up and down Zhongshan Lu eating various types of snacks including shaved ice, shumai, buns, etc. It was yummy and reminded me of Taiwan.

That night, I flew from Xiamen to Manila, my first international stop in my trip this summer.