Hello!
First off... I'm glad I'm not around to watch the Bears suck this year!!
Since last writing, We have travelled north of Dali and visited the towns of Lijiang and Shangri-la. On our last night of Dali, we took a gondola up to a mountain top and stayed at a hostel there. It was cool getting away from the city noise for a while and we got to enjoy great views and good traditional Bai foods with the hosts. We then moved north to Lijiang for one night. This is a historic town that was rebuilt in a way that makes it look very fake. It was a town that Chinese tourists love to visit. It was very beutiful but literally was swarmed with tourists and very cheezy all in all. We stayed for the evening and then took an early bus further north to "Tiger Leaping Gorge" The deepest gorge in the world formed by the Gangzi River. It was a beautiful two day hike with massive mountains towering over us from each angle. The river had some enormous rapids ripping through the gorge! We slept at a guest house in the middle of the Hike. It was a great experience and very beautiful. We have since moved to the town of Shangri-la. This place is very cool and though is not actually in Tibet, it is home to 65% Tibetans and really screams with Tibetan culture. We climed to some beautiful buddhist temples and checked out a very cool city overlook that was covered with Buddhist prayer flags. This is a town that westerners love to visit and sometimes seem to stay for awhile. It is far from the crowded cities of most of China, has an unbelievable culture, and is surrounded by beautiful mountains and valleys. The one down fall here is the Cold! Most of the guest houses have no heat and it probably gets down to 20 or so at night. Good thing we brought some sleeping bags! Anyways, we are now waiting to hop onto a bus that will take us 6 hours to the furthest northern city in the Yunnan province. It is called Daxin and is located on the border of Tibet, India, and Burma (Myanmar). We hear that there is a beautiful mountain range near the town with peaks that are up to 20,000 feet high. We had only planned to go as far north as Shangra-la, but not suprisingly have been intrigued by the scared and massive mountians a bit further north. So why not, right? After two nights there, we are taking a 2 day bus trip to the border of Laos and joining this eco-tour through the jungle there. We will have to fill you all in on that a bit later. All in all, it has been a bit more relaxing in these smaller northern mountain towns. We have been enjoying this trip alot but miss everyone at home.
Also with photos, We decided to catch everyone up on photos through kodak.com. We sent a email to all the email addresses we could remember and asked others to forward them on. So expect to get them soon. We are still working on getting them on this blog, but it may have to be only a few at a time.
Anyways, we will probably write next from Laos!
