Chongqing, Dali, Lijiang

ChongQing, DaLi, and LiJiang

I have very few pictures of these places owing to an accident I had in DaLi. I spend jsut a few hours in ChongQing and didn't have time to take many pictures. ChongQing is about the worse place I can imagine to put a city. First, its split in three by rivers. What's worse is the fact that it's built in the mountains. The entire city is either going up or down hill. I couldn't get a train directly to KunMing so I took the next one to ChengDu, thinking I could easily get a train from there. As it turned out, the train station wasn't even selling tickets in advance, the only way to get them was through a travel agent. I was preparing for a major snag in my trip when I walked outside and saw a bus with the characters for KunMing on it. For the outrageous price of Ľ300 I could take a 24 hour bus trip there. After calculating the cost of the agent, ticket, and hotel while I waited, I decided to take it. The drivers wouldn't leave until the bus was full, which took another 4 hours. It didn't take me long to realize the drivers had no idea where Kunming was. At every fork in the road they would have to stop and ask directions. Souther SiChuan and northern YunNan Provinces are laced with mountains. To get there, the bus, this old bus, had to go up and down winding mountain paths. The bus would overheat about once an hour and have to cool off. Finally, they got it repaired. We got to KunMing 36 hours after we began. I took several pictures along the way which were also ruined. I didn't stay long in KunMing because there wasn't a lot to do. Great weather though. It finally gave me a chance to warm up. From there I went to DaLi, an old city that's been preserved by the tourist industry. The best thing about DaLi is that the amount of tourist they get means they have a lot of western food. Sort of. It was in DaLi that I was climbing in the mountains when I got lost and had to follow a river to get out. In several places I couldn't get around it because of the high cliffs so I had to jump in, ruining my clothes, radio, and the film in my camera, as well as my health and dampening my spirits. From DaLi I went to LiJiang, another old city only bigger. This one actually has been preserved, not just a few buildings but the streets and canals as well. Its rated as a UN World Heritage Site. Again, a lot of western food, again not much to do. It was a nice place to walk around though. I was just breazing from one city to another now, but this was supposed to be the part of the trip where I could relax.

	This is the only picture I took of ChongQing. It does show what I felt characterized the city: crowds. SiChuan is China's most populated province, and ChongQing is one of the biggest cities. This city center is well planned for it, though. There are no traffic lanes, just pedestrian streets. The white thing sticking up in the middle is the Martyr's Monument. Most major cities have these to commemorate the soldiers who died during liberation.
A misty view of the tiny city of DaLi and ErHai Lake from the mountain I got lost in. This was one of the last pictures I took before taking the plunge.
	LiJiang still retains much of its ancient architecture. Several canals cut through the city, crossed by stone bridges.
Another canal passing through an alleyway.
	A pair of women using the canal to wash their clothes.
Old and new again. YunNan is home to many of China's minority people. Often old women still dress in their traditional native outfits. Men dress like all Chinese men, in Charman Mao suits. Here a group of elderly NaXi women wander through the streets of the new city surrounding LiJiang's Old City.