In Dali at the moment, it's a nice little place. Though you know
you're in a tourist town when the trash bins on the street are shaped
like little pagodas - not tacky at all.
From here on to Lijiang and then, finally, Tiger Leaping Gorge.
Organising my Tibet trip at the moment - looks like I will end up in Lhasa on the 1st of October (60 yr anniversary). I am a master of timing.
The
whole permit situation is a bit of a hassle, especially if you don't
like tour groups, oh well. I'm going to try to get up to the border
region around Deqin by myself though (staying on the Yunnan side
though, of course). Deqin itself is something like %80 Tibetan anyway,
<political comments elided>. Not sure how much time I will have
left between TLG and Lhasa though (I want to spend at least a couple
days in the area.)
Apparently, I may need to have the original Tibet Travel Permit
before I go to Lhasa - which means I will have to mess around with the
Chinese postal system and be somewhere predictable for a while, ugh.
Maybe I can organise something overland to Tibet though...
After Tibet, I will start to move a bit faster, current plans include:
- Beijing (+great wall)
- Xian (terracotta warriors)
- Huang Shan
- Qingdao (brewery tour)
- Chengdu (hotpot + pandas - no panda hotpot jokes, chinese are sensitive about these big guys)
- Chongquing (three gorges cruise)
- Henan (shaolin temple)
Anything I've left out? (I'm saving the north-east for one day when I come back for the winter festival in Harbin)
And then after that, there is a plan, a crazy plan (which is the only kind of plan I like), if I have the stones for it. More on that later.
