Digital crumbs lead you to yaks

Our next stop was Lijiang. We've been told this is one of the most beautiful towns in China. Well that's a tall order to live up to, but in addition to the town's inherent beauty, we found out that there is an excellent hike to be done a few hours away. We arrived late at night by plane since taking the bus would have exceeded our newly decided on 15-hour rule. We were greeted to stars (the first I had seen in months) and cold weather. Everyone was in thickly padded coats and I felt like I had just arrived on the Bolivian Altiplano. Fortunately Andrea had made a reservation at our guesthouse and had arranged the hotel to pick us up. There were no street lights out on our ride into town, only winding mountain roads, so the stars were amazingly bright. However that also meant we really couldn't see where we were going or what the town looked like. So it was quite a surprise the next morning to find out selves in this beautiful quaint old town with a labyrinth of cobble stone roads.




We had made plans to meet up with Peter and Jenny, so in an effort to not get lost I decided to take some digital pictures of the various twists and turns in order so that we would could find our way back (read the next post to find out how well this turned out).

We found Peter and Jenny and they had already hired a minibus to take them to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Park. Andrea and I decided to tag along. It was great we strolled up to this park and took a cable car ride up to Yak Meadow. And you know what you see in Yak meadow...yaks!!! I was so excited to finally see one of these creatures, but was a bit disappointed when we got there and could only see these little specks off in the horizon. We tried our best to get as close as possible, but there were in a fenced off area that we were not allowed in so I began to do my yak calls. It wasn't very effective since I don't actually know how to call a yak, but I did get a yak to give me a dirty look before resuming its meal of wild grasses.



The zoom on my camera is only so-so, but I did get some pics and was happy enough to call it a day. Fortunately Andrea suggested we turn back and go check out a temple with prayer flags that we could see on the horizon.

When we got there it was interesting but nothing too exciting until we heard a local doing a real yak call. He got the yak to get closer to him and even enticed the yak with an apple. We were just frozen with anticipation...would we really be up close and personal with a yak? Well the local man brought the yak down to within about 10 feet from us and we snapped up dozens of yak photos including the young calf that came along in tow.



It was such a great experience. The yak has always been one of my favorite animals, mainly because I love the exotic sounding name of this creature and few people even know what one looks like. I have to admit that I was one of those people up until I met one in person.

Oh and the yak jerky is great too, we got to stock up on the stuff in town for our hike to Tiger Leaping Gorge.