In the middle of nowhere

I think that it is safe to say that by far my favorite place in China so far has been a tiny little town deep in Yunnan province, called Shaxi. Everywhere else here is either a huge bustling city full of towering skyscrapers, flashing lights and crowds of people bustling about, or kitschy tourist traps that seem to be more designed around attracting tourists and getting money out of them than anything else. And this isn't aimed only at Western tourists, but it seems more at the Chinese themselves as they travel around the country too.

Shaxi, however, was seriously off the beaten track. It took us a day and a half to get there! We even started fairly early with an 8am train leaving Kunming; unfortunately though this ended up taking about 9 hours to reach Xiaguan, from where we needed to get a three hour bus up to Jianchuan, and even that wasn't the end of the journey! However, seeing as we reached Jianchuan at gone 10 pm we decided to stay for the night before tackling the next leg of the journey. In fact, the final minibus there proved relatively easy and also only lasted for one hour.

The town itself is more of a village, there are no buildings taller than about 3 stories, and it has a number of quaint little backstreets to wander. It is even possible to step outside the boundaries and find yourself next to a river in the middle of rice fields. The day we arrived there was a market going on, which attracts people from miles around for fresh fruit and vegetables for the week, with people walking up to 4 hours to reach it from neighbouring villages in the mountains. It was interesting to walk around an actual market that wasn't full of people grabbing you and trying to sell you souvenirs. I think we ended up attracting more attention than I'm used to; I possibly didn't help matters by deciding that I wanted to win a fish in one of the games they were playing in the street (I did in the end, then unsure what to do with it having won it handed it over to a bemused little girl who had been watching).

On one day Ray and I hired bikes to get out of the town and head up the mountain while Helen settled in to explore more of the town - it took a while going up as the incline was fairly steep and we had to take a detour through a small village as they were laying a concrete road part way up the mountain. The views were spectacular, we were the only people around for miles except for the occasional farmer wandering past with mules and we could see the valley floor for miles around mostly just covered with fields with the odd group of buildings cropping up sporadically.

I'm still enjoying the crazy hectic travelling and will soon be heading up Tiger Leaping Gorge which is just outside Lijiang, where I am now for an apparently exhausting but worthwhile two day hike.