Shangrila, Yunnan: I've spent the past week settling in to my new home and routine. I'm living at the Harmony Guesthouse, a pretty hostel in the Tibetan Old Town.


The ladder beside my door leads to the roof which has nice views of the surrounding mountains.



My roof perch also allows me to see into my neighbor's tiny courtyard which is home to a flock of chickens, six pigs, four Mastiff puppies and (usually) three dirty Tibetan children.

I've made some good friends here already and there's an amazing array of people that live here or are passing through. My friend Keith is a journalist and photographer writing a book on Yunnan it's people. Mari works for Australia Volunteers International (Australian equivalent of the Peace Corps), Loja translates Chinese radio into Tibetan, Jason and Amy own a cozy bar across the street and run a Tibetan tour company, Xiaoyun works in the office at ETLI and Anthony, Ann and Megan are all teachers at like me. That's lots of names, but already they are people that matter to me here!

Shangrila is bigger than I expected but the Old Town feels like a small town and everyone says hello. My new favorite spot is on the way to the white chicken monastery that gives great views of the whole town. (I've been spending whole days up there reading Steppenwolf and musing about the Immortals.)





"He has a suspicion of his allotted place in the world, a suspicion of the Immortals, a suspicion that he may meet himself face to face: and he is aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter need to look and from which he shrinks with such deathly fear."

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Shangrila, Yunnan: I'm here at last! It's been raining non-stop since I arrived but my guesthouse (and the cozy bar across the street) keeps me warm with big woodstoves and an ample supply of yak-butter tea. The tea is a staple of the Tibetan diet and it's perfect for warming you up from the inside. It's made by mixing black tea with yak butter and milk in a long thin churn. The resulting tea is thick and creamy but salty. If you let it go too long, the butter will congeal on top. (That happened to me the first time I drank it and I ended up eating a bowl of butter so I wouldn't seem impolite!)


I've arrived yesterday just in time for start of the Horse Festival. Every June, after the planting time and before mushroom picking season, Zhongdian (Shangrila's original Chinese name) holds a three day festival of dancing, horse racing and general revelry. I found out today that there's also a snake lady tent, a dog show for Tibetan Mastiffs and plenty of wierd food on sticks. The fair grounds were filled with Tibetans in traditional dress (pink headresses and long aprons for the women; big capes and sabers for the men) and a stage in the middle showcased traditional dance. There were a few fanny-pack laden tourists, but the festival really seems like a local celebration.

My favorite part of the day was meeting a group of children from a nearby orphanage. They were sitting on the wall of the racetrack, cheering for one of their schoolmates who was pulling ahead in the race. They looked really happy perched there (rosy cheeked and muddy), and it reminded me that Shangrila is everywhere, for everyone.

Lijiang, Yunnan: My first day in Lijiang has been pretty exhausting. It started with the bus ride during which I shared a mini-bus with: a giant pile of corn-cobs (on my seat), 8 (of 10) smoking passengers, a stinky (really stinky) Tibetan baby and a seatmate blasting the worst (WORST) Chinese pop at full volume on a mini cassete player. No one else seemed to bat an eye, so I didn't either (and calmly removed the corncobs from my seat). Sometimes it's actually the random and ridiculous things that I love the most about travelling...


Once I arrived in Lijiang, things started looking up. It's a beautiful old Naxi town with miles of cobbled streets, winding canals, and hidden courtyards. After an earthquake a few years ago, the old town was rebuilt in the traditional Naxi style and was declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Since then, it's grown exponentially and become the tourist hub of Yunnan. And tourists are everywhere, travelling by the busload behind guides with yellow umbrellas, snapping pictures and adjusting their fanny packs. (please note: contrary to a popular and slanderous rumor, I do not own a fanny pack.)

While the tourism boom has been good for Lijiang's economy, most of the native Naxi and Tibetan minorities see less benefit than the Han Chinese entrepreneurs. The main goal of ETLI, the school I'll be teaching with, is to give minority people from underserved communities the skills to capitalize on all the tourism development. Here in Lijiang, I'm beginning to see how worthy that goal is.


While Lijiang is beautiful, I'm anxious to get away from the hubub and glitzy tourist facades to somewhere more peaceful and closer to my own version of Shangrila.

Kawa Karpo, Yunnan: Northwest of Shangrila are the sacred peaks of the Kawa Karpo range. The bus-ride here was one of the most intense and beautiful rides I've ever been on.


Alternating between sweeping valleys and dizzying gorges, the road winds it's way up and up toward the six snowy peaks over 6000m.



As we climbed, civilization dwindled to a few tents and nomad huts like this one.



We passed the beginnings of two legendary rivers, the Yangtze and the Mekong. The first bend of the Yangtze is sight to see from the road, snaking around a mountain, hundreds of meters below.



We woke up early to share the sunrise with the mountain and the pilgrims who had traveled there to pay their respects. (My camera was giving me trouble so the final results are a little disappointing. Trust me when I say though, it's the most amazing set of mountains I've seen yet.)