Nanda & Nathan The Travellers: Shangri-La 香格里拉

March 17-18, 2014 ---- Shangri-La is the place I was most excited about in our trip to Yunnan. The long distance bus from Lijiang to Shangri-La took 4 hours, and the driver stopped for a smoke break for 15 minutes. There are both small vans and big buses that leave every hour, but you had better buy the ticket at least a day in advance because locals do travel a lot.

As soon as we got to the bus station, we hopped on a taxi to find our hotel, but because it's located in the old town, and no car is allowed to enter, the taxi driver just dropped us off at the gate of the Old Town. And again...we were lost for an hour or so. The Old Town had a fire back in January, and a lot of hotels were burned down to the ground. Someone claimed that our hotel probably did not exist anymore, and some told us to walk in to the wrong direction. Moreover, we didn't have the hotel's phone number, so we wandered around quite a long time. When we were about to give up and look for another hotel, we went into a nice hotel, explained our situation and asked if we could use their WiFi to look for our reserved hotel's location. We found it! It was right on the edge of the Old Town. Lesson leaned: Print out the hotel map before traveling.

After dropping off our stuff at the hotel, we took off for Songzanlin Monastery right away. The bus right in front of the hotel went strait to the monastery in less than an hour. It was a great experience riding a bus here and seeing how locals, Tibetan monks and lay people, interact with each others.

Songzanlin Monastery is beautiful! It was my first time seeing a Tibetan Buddhist temple. We went into as many buildings as we could, but we couldn't take any photos inside. The scenery outside was also nice. We could see the Tibetan community right outside of the monastery. There were cows, pigs, and chickens freely wandering around the town for food. We saw many Tibetan monks; some were taking care of the monastery and some seemed to live in the community. At around 7 p.m. a lot of people walked to a small temple on the left side of Songzanlin for an evening worship.

The last bus was supposed to leave Songzanlin Monastery at 7 p.m., but it left earlier. Nathan and I had to hitchhike to get back to town. Luckily two young Tibetans kindly drove us to where we could get a taxi back to town.

At Shangri-La Old Town, there's Buddhist temple on top of the hill. It's a nice place to get a view of the entire town.

The next day our hotel owners arranged a tour for us to visit Snow Mountain and the Grassland. We got a private driver who is Tibetan but can speak Chinese fluently. The Snow Mountain was about 4,500 meters above sea level, and we got up there by a long gondola ride. It was kind of scary because the gondola seemed to be of low quality and swung when the wind blew. Once we got to the top, I was relieved to still be alive!

Snow Mountain was breathtaking! It was cold and extremely windy. Luckily I decided to rent a thick winter coat before going up there; otherwise, I wouldn't have survived the cold wind. We noticed that the air was thin there, and many people purchased a can of oxygen in case they needed it, but neither Nathan nor I needed it, and I kept walking slow to save the air. On the peak of the mountain were many piles of rocks made to be holy Stupas, and there were nice broad boardwalks around the top of the mountain. We walked around for only about 30 minutes and had to get back inside because it was too cold and too windy to linger too long. There were some hot drinks and food for sale up there too.

The grassland was really dry in the winter. It was very brown and there wasn't anything to see other than the snow-peak mountains and the brownish land. We saw some horses and a lot of pigs digging the ground for food, and the horse ride was pretty nice but expensive. The best time to come here is definitely in the summer when the grasses turn green and the wild flowers are in bloom.