Today’s excursion would be done manually without a tour, so we were up early again and off to the station to grab a train an hour and a half north to Shangri-la, a place mythically meaning paradise, utopia, or heaven.
The good thing about being up and about before dawn is that it’s the best time to be in Lijiang’s old town streets, which are devoid of the selfie-seeking hordes.
The town, called Xianggelilia in Chinese, is nestled in the Himalayan foothills in the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and has a distinctly Tibetan feel to it compared to Lijiang. Wide empty roads and a lot of construction were evident as the place slowly opens up to domestic and foreign tourism and the rampant development that comes with it. The primary attraction is the sprawling Songzanlin Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, north of the town at over 3,300 meters elevation.
As with many things we’ve seen here, there was a queue and a bus from the ticket office to the temple. Fortunately, the weather was fantastic today, and the colourful yellows and ochres of the Tibetan structures really stood out against the blue skies. Hundreds of young Chinese tourists donned local Tibetan attire and posed for their selfies while elder pilgrims sought solace in the shade of this sprawling place of worship.
The monastery belongs to the Tibetan Buddhist Gelukpa order of the Dalai Lama, established in 1679. Today, it is home to around 2,000 monks, though there were more tourists than monks in attendance.
We grabbed a cab using the DiDi app to the Shangri-la old town, which appeared to be more of a construction site with buildings being renovated and traffic clogging the cobbled streets. Lunch was more stir-fried yak and local beer at a Tibetan eatery in the old town, and we wandered around before it was time to head back to the station for the return train to Lijiang.
Touring manually is very cheap in China, with the entire day (trains, taxis, entrance tickets, bus, food, and drink) costing around 232 yuan (1,100 baht/$34) per person. The beautiful weather also made it one of the best days of the trip for me.
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