In the Shadow of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains
Our first full day in Lijiang - and what a day it was!! Days like this can be described as perfect - perfect wandering, perfect breakfast, perfect mountains, perfect weather! Our french doors of our hotel room flew open to clear blue skies and sun. We wandered around Old Town looking for a breakfast place and discovered the gem that is the Prague Cafe. Yes, not exactly your authentic breakfast, but this place has amazing food, very nice servers, and excellent coffee!! One of our top ten favorite breakfast places of all time! They even had a very cute kitten wandering the cafe while we ate - and I got to hold it and play with it - and let it get up to my elbow!After a leisurely breakfast, we made our way to the Black Dragon Pool Park north of the Old Town. This is THE place to photo the incredible Jade Dragon Snow Mountains - these are part of the Himalaya build up to the Tibetan Plateau. Wow. They are such beautiful mountains - and only 25 km out of town! The Black Dragon Park was a lovely place to wander and enjoy the spring weather they are having here in Yunnan province - all the trees and flowers are in full bloom! Each step along the path brought a new photo opportunity - either of the mountains, or the flowers, or the flowers and the mountains together!
After our stroll through the park, we beat a path to the bus station, where we could secure transportation to those incredible mountains. As soon as our minibus filled up, we were off! The drive was amazing as those peaks came closer and closer. There were two different meadows we could have visited - one with the world's highest-altitude golf course, and one with a chairlift to a higher-meadow view of glaciers. Which do you think we picked? The chairlift ride was beyond words - really, the whole afternoon was beyond words. Such verticality, such beautiful forest that smelled wonderful in the warm afternoon sun, and so many picture stops!
We spent a very long, lazy afternoon in that meadow, making the full circuit of the boardwalk around the meadow, taking pictures, and oohing and aahing the whole way.
The ride down the chairlift proved even more photogenic than the ride up, so we snapped away even more!! We went through three camera batteries today! Our only disappointing moment of the day was the drive away from the mountains - packed in a minivan with 10 of us, several people on laps, no chance for pictures!:(As evening fell, we walked the streets of Lijiang, stopping at a music store for some traditional Naxi music (hopefully - no way to listen to CDs before purchase), eating some delicious baked goods from a bakery (no, not chocolate filling - it's those sweet beans again!), eventually making our way back to Old Town. We ate a great dinner of pizza, beer, and fried rice at the Prague Cafe (yes, the food is that good!), and talked a long while with American students here in Lijiang studying for teaching degrees. Afterwards, we wandered the back alleys and canals looking for great photo ops and of course, a "wangba" - internet cafe - where the email might actually work tonight. No such luck.