Travel to Lijiang along the Old Silk Road In Southwest China

The ancient city of Lijiang owes much of its unique character to its crossroads location on the old Silk Road also called the Ancient Tea and Horse Road or Ancient Tea Route. The Ancient Southern Silk Road starting from Burma, wandered across Lijiang, traveled through Persia (Iran) and wound its way to the Mediterranean Sea. Travelers en route brought along with their goods, their religions, their customs, their languages, their science, their philosophy and their cuisines much of which remained and blurred into local culture.

Today travelers this way continue to leave behind their culture to the consternation of the purist. In fact, many of the more seasoned explorers advise avoiding Lijiang with its western influences,  fast-food restaurant chains, faux historics structures and costumes, and flocks of Chinese and western tourists. To us, Lijiang was just the degree of exotic we wanted to explore in this region of China, and only a short distance from the place which Hilton in Lost Horizon dubbed Shangri- la.

The hotel where we stayed in Lijiang meanders around the foothills, lower ones, that run below what ultimately leads to the Himalayas and some of the highest peaks in the world.   

Lijiang is full of stories.  Stories of an orchestra that survived the communists who tried to eradicate them during the cultural revolution.  Tried to take away from them their history, their culture, their music.  It survived. And now the ancient orchestra plays with joy to visitors who come throughout China to hear them.

Other stories revolve around people who live near Dr. Joseph Rock's old house and bedeck visitors with flowers.

And others are around  exotic foods being sold in the markets and around people full of humor and casualness so unlike Beijing.  

And around a society led by women where men play instruments and lead a more leisurely life.   And where anicent 

Here we had a Dongba shaman inscribe an anniversary message in the ancient Dongba script. 

Although now crawling with tourists (mostly Chinese), Lijiang is  a World Heritage Site worth adding  to your bucket list.   

Breakfast in Beijing - First Glimpses of China

After flying through the night amidst mostly Chinese whose constant chatter made sleep hopeless, I dropped into the comfortable bed at the Fairmont with a serious headache and finally fell into a blissful coma.  In the morning, after not having seen much through the foggy or more correctly smoggy ride from the airport, we were eager to explore the place where we seemed to have arrived at in a dream.

Under a hot, grey, cottony sky, we embarked on our first journey in this astonishing land.  Right across from our five-star hotel, lanes, jutting into the main street, were jammed with  improvised, shabby-looking outdoor stands where proprietors cooked breakfast for Beijingers emerging from the nearby subway on the way to work.

Cooks prepared delicious looking egg sandwiches, sesame dumplings, meats on sticks and other easy to-take-away style food.

Young Chinese grabbed bytes on the way to modern office buildings that loomed above what appeared to be remnants of China past both the old hutongs from the 13th  century  and drab, low-story housing complexes with window air-conditioning units from the Communist-era of the 50s and 60s,.  

Taking a full tour of the immediate surroundings which was in the business district of Beijing, we came across a  so-called entertainment district and encountered our first example of "Chinglish," funny, weirdly written English, on a sign.

The contrasts between the old, the new, the poor, the rich, the west, the east were thrown together in this short walk in a hodgepodge that made clear the stark reality of Chinese ambiguity.  We watched as mingled traffic of dogs, people, carts, autos and buses navigated the cross streets without much guidance still managing for the most part to avoid collisions.  We marveled at modern, clean subways with an amazingly seamless security system, and the landslide of new construction wherever we looked.

While we gaped at all we were seeing, Beijingers gaped at us. When we finally arrived at a dim sum restaurant (Din Tai Fung in the Sun King Place mall) for our late breakfast, the waiters and other patrons stared openly at us as we devoured mini dumplings and amazing vegetables.

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