Tue Mar 5, 2019 08:31 GMT
Today, we leave Litang to go to Shangri-La, in Yunnan. Because it’s a pretty long way to go, we’ll make a stopover in Xiangcheng halfway. The bus system to go to Xiangcheng is a bit peculiar: one cannot buy tickets in advance, there’s a single bus per day starting from Kangding, passing by Litang, and finally going to Xiangcheng. If there are empty seats on the bus as it leaves Litang, you can get in, if not you stay in Litang.
We get to the bus station a bit before 11am, which according to the ticket lady was the hour when they know if there’s any seat left in the bus. It turns out that nobody really knows and that we have to wait till the bus arrives, so we find a spot in the sun and wait. We meet the only other traveler in the station, a French guy biking his way from Thailand back home, who’s still pondering between bike and bus to cross the next pass at 4600m high. We chat a bit while he eats his lunch, he finally decides to attempt biking, we wish him good luck and go back to waiting in the sun.
Most of the time, the station has no buses, the employees seat in the sun with us and chat together, while observing with curiousity everything we happen to take out of our backpack, phone, book etc. Around 1pm, a guy comes to us and delivers our sentence: the bus is full, no seats to Xiangcheng for today. We bid farewell to the station employees, load our backpacks on our shoulders, and we’re on the road again!
We’ve had some luck last time with hitch hiking, so we decide to try again, it’s still early enough to have a chance to catch a car going there. And we get luck again, after a couple of minutes a car stops, and accepts to take us to Xiangcheng for around the same price as two bus tickets. We get in, Xiangcheng here we come!
The road, like the one which took us from Kangding to Litang, is beautiful, we cross one desertic plateau after another, driving through snowy passes between each. We’re surrounded by mountains, yaks (as usual), prayer flags and white stuppas. Once in a while we cross a Tibetan village, with its characteristic houses.
As with last time we hitch hiked, our driver listens exclusively to Tibetan music. This time we also get Tibetan pop, and unlike last time the video clips continue playing even while the car’s diving. Tibetan pop is ok for a few minutes, but it does get a bit tiring after a few hours…
This is Tibet, so we get police controls again. The first one goes pretty smoothly, we get off the car, get our passports checked, the officer exercises his English (“what’s your name? My name is …”), and we leave. The second one just before reaching Xiangcheng takes a bit more time, we stay in the car but the officer takes our passports, and the driver has to get down to talk with the officers. They go through the passports many times, taking photocopies, pictures, the whole thing lasts a good fifteen minutes without us having any idea of what’s happening. Finally, we get the green light to go again.
We’ll soon understand what the discussion between the driver and the policemen was about, they apparently asked him to notice the police when he’d drop us in Xiangcheng: as we get off the car, a “welcoming committee” of two officers is waiting for us, and of course wants to know what we’ll be going, where we’ll be sleeping etc. Maureen finds the name of a guesthouse in the travel guide, but we tell the officer we want to get our bus tickets for tomorrow first. He escorts us to the ticket office, and then to our hotel. Unfortunately, the dirt-cheap guesthouse we wanted has the same name as a huge hotel on the main street, the police of course takes us there. The whole thing is pretty funny for us so far, but we know remember other foreigners telling us that “foreigner compatible” hotels in China are at least three stars…
Indeed, this is a three (Chinese) stars hotel, and the lady at the counter asks for 160¥ (20€) a night. I bargain a bit and get it down to 140¥, but don’t manage to get it any lower… I tell the officer that this is too much, and show him other cheaper hotels I found on Baidu Maps (the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps), he replies that those are not “foreigner hotels”, and that we can’t go there. I ask what’s a foreigner hostel: “a hotel with personal specialized for foreigners”. This apparently doesn’t include speaking English… After playing stupid for a couple minutes more, the price goes down to 120¥, still 20¥ over our goal, but good enough. Tonight we’ll sleep in a three star hotel!
We go for a walk around Xiangcheng, which has little charm but some old traditional houses worth seeing. The houses don’t have straight walls but have a trapezoidal shape. Roofs and windows are also heavily decorated with painted wood. As in Litang, the police presence is very strong here.
At the Northern end of the “new” city, the old village spreads in the valley.
One nice thing about Xiangcheng is that it’s warm! We walk around with our jacket open, and can stay seated on the main square to watch people dance even after sunset without freezing. This is our last day in Sichuan, so we decide for Sichuanese food for dinner, various kinds of spicy noodles.
We retire in our hotel room, which, for once, has a working shower with hot water! No need for a heating blanket tonight, tomorrow morning we’re heading to Shangri-La… Where the weather forecast tells us it’s snowing!