Towards the Mountain of the Jade Dragon

One thing I love about China: it affords me to ferociously indulge in my hiking habit. Outside of Dali is a mountain range with a nice walking path skirting the edge of the cliffs. If you want to be a wuss, you can take a cable car up to the path. Me being no wuss, I hiked to the trail head, then up the mountain, then another nine kilometers across the mountain path. There my bragging stops, however. The path is a paved (or stone I guess) trail that has barely a hint of a grade on it. Then I took the cable car back down. I was hungry and there were no places to eat! It was great to get a bit of nature back into my system. There were hardly any people on the trail up, and there was a nice fresh forest smell and a lot of birds singing.

Today I jumped on a morning bus to Lijiang. What was supposed to be a short, four hour bus ride turned out be a shitty six hour ride. The sun beamed down on me the whole time due to the fact there was no curtain for my window, so I sat there and sweat the entire time. Then a dude that got on beside me had the worst case of bad breath I've ever smelled. I swear the paint was peeling off the walls. The one cool thing I can salvage out of that ride was the T-54 tanks doing exercises along the highway, that was bitchin. Due to that abortion of a bus ride and the fact that Lijiang looks pretty nice, I'm going to dedicate another day to it instead of heading straight to Tiger Leaping Gorge tomorrow. It will be worth it enough just to get a picture of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain from the Black Dragon Pool. Apparently the photo op is supposed to be one of the best in China, one that a hobbying photographer like myself can't miss.