
This is Melissa's post: (since I think "She said" is copyrighted).
Sunday - We had to catch the Express Bus to Lijiang early in the morning, so we asked the manager at the rustic Jim's Tibetan Peace Hostel to please give us a wake up call at 7:00 the next morning. Luckily, a combination of lingering jet lag, exhaustion from scrambling up mountains every day to get to scenic areas, and fatigue from sudden changes in altitude had us going to bed every night at about 10:00, so we just woke up naturally the next morning at around 6:45. This turned out to be lucky, as Jim's Tibetan Hostel of Neglect completely failed to provide the requested wake up call, although a couple of Dalian roosters picked up the slack by crowing at around 7:00. Rich suggested that perhaps the wake up call at Jim's Hostel of Customer Service--What's That? would consist of them placing a couple of roosters outside our door.
We went downstairs and, being idiots, attempted to order breakfast in Jim's Tibetan Hostel of Inexplicable Delays. Rich's breakfast came right away, and he went ahead and ate it. Forty minutes later, Rich ran outside to flag down the Express Bus and I begged them for my breakfast. They eventually made it and boxed it up for me, and we went outside to catch the bus. Breakfast was not good.
The ride to Lijiang was actually quite pretty and uneventful. The views were neat (lots of the terraced fields to which I am particularly partial, and toiling workers, which makes Rich feel wealthy and powerful) and they showed a strange western movie involving cowboys and Jet Li, who somehow manages to lose his memory in the movie (as Rich pointed out, that seems to happen in all his movies). It was partially in English and partially in Mandarin, so I may have been the only person on the bus to understand all of it.
It was very hot when we got to Lijiang--it's a town high up in the mountains, so it is fairly chilly when the sun isn't on you, but the sun is quite strong. We wandered around Old Town Lijiang for a while, completely unable to figure out where we were based on (1) the map in Lonely Planet, (2) the map we bought from an old woman on the street, and (3) the maps posted by the town on wooden signs every block or so in Old Town Lijiang. We tried for about an hour, but could not find our way to the hostel where we had wanted to stay, and eventually just stumbled into a hotel and decided to stay there. It was a pretty authentic Chinese courtyard hotel, which was fairly nice, although later we learned that the people upstairs from us were gymnasts who were intent on practicing their floor routines in their hotel room all throughout the night.
With the daylight rapidly fading, we decided to walk up to Black Dragon Pool, which wasn't supposed to be really great, but was supposed to have a view of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain that is considered to be *the* photo op of all of southwestern China. It was kind of pretty. We also spied steps going up something called "Elephant Hill" and, as is our wont, we started scrambling upwards. It turned out to be a very tough walk up, but rewarded us with some pretty views of Lijiang, Black Dragon Pool, and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
Afterwards, we returned to town and hit a few of the hiking gear stores (Lijiang is the last major stop on the way to Tiger Leaping Gorge, which is a fairly famous hike) so Rich could examine each and every fleece available in minute detail. We paused in our fleece crawl to have some dinner at a barbecue joint that we passed on the way to the Black Dragon Pool. There are these open air restaurants with tables set up outside with lots of different types of food on skewers. They tell you how much each type of skewer costs, and you pick some for them to cook for you on a charcoal grill. It turned out to be really fantastically good. Yak meat is better than I expected. We had a couple of drinks at a bar next door, and then wandered back to the hotel, at which point Rich convinced me again to go fleece shopping with him. He picked out a really nice fleece for his mom, who is heading to Alaska soon and will need something to keep her warm and dry.