life's adventures This is the story of my wanderings through Asia

I’ll begin with our bus ride to LiJiang, a very well known touristy spot in Yunnan province. The laneways can barely fit cars, so during the day in the old town its foot traffic only. The cobbles are uneven and small rivers flow down some streets, we assume they come from the snowy mountains; that were at the time covered by a dense mass of grey back cloud. The rain was a hindrance for us as no taxi will enter the old town, so we had no directions to the hostel, just a vague wave in the general direction of a maze of streets. After asking some Chinese tourists, they could ask locals on our behalf, so we found the warmth and coziness of Mama Naxi’s number 3 guest house. The woman herself is hard to miss; she has a raspy loud voice that seems to shout in every direction at every person. We were starving and when Josh picked up the menu, he was barked at ‘No food, no food’, which we soon found out means they have a communal dinner coming along shortly and its cheaper and better than anything the menu offers. We contacted Brian and Jo to sort out a plan for tomorrow, and were given directions to a bar, of course. And of course when we arrived they were on their way to dinner, so we sat around and talked to the others occupying the small homely bar, the Stoned Crow. As I have found very often in the last year, foreigners who have inhabited another country for any number of years tend to pick up some cultural habits native to the people of the land, so everything for this festival was rather disorganized. We briefly saw Brian and Jo before they went off to a place that is impossible to find, and in the rain we wandered for a while up and down the same street until we found the locked and barred door of our guest house.