Onwards and upwards

We're inching ever closer to the Himalayas. Dali is squeezed between a chain of 4000m-plus mountains and a bright blue lake; we're now at 2400m in Lijiang, and there's a mountain just north of town that at 5600m is nearly as tall as Mont Blanc with Ben Nevis balanced on top of it. (Oops - I told Faye it was taller and she's put that in her blog...)

The modest altitude so far already seems to be having quite an effect on our energy levels and sleeping patterns, so if I don't update my blog for a while it's because I'm too high up to be able to lift my fingers on the keyboard, or even get out of bed.

Fortunately after a couple of very cold days, this part of China has warmed up, so our plan to use Laos as a delaying tactic appears to have worked. From here we plan to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, along the early stages of the Yangzi river. Then it's north to Zhongdian, which the Chinese authorities insist is in fact the real-world Shangri-La from James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (www.answers.com/topic/lost-horizon-novel). This is probably not true, especially as Lost Horizon is fiction, but it certainly explains why the novel is the only English-language book in Chinese bookshops around here. And from Zhongdian, it's a bit uncertain. There's a very tough backroads route north into Sichuan province, which traverses several 4000m passes and territory that is apparently in some ways more Tibetan than Tibet, as it hasn't been flooded with Chinese from the East as has Tibet. Or there's the possibility of joining a not-really-permitted-but-tolerated tour in a Land Rover into Tibet itself. Or, if we prove to be completely unable to deal with the altitude, there's the 'normal' route (read: for lightweights) into Sichuan province on the train.

Dali, with Zhonghe Peak in the background


About to enjoy Chinese food in typically inauspicious surroundings


View from the West Gate of the old town up to Zhonghe. We walked some of the way up, which half killed us (OK, me in particular)


So we got the cable car back down


Faye in Lijiang with her new love, steamed buns with sausage roll-type filling


This is Doctor Ho Junior, son of the famous Doctor Ho, a Chinese herbalist who has apparently cured many people around the world of various ailments. We were more impressed that they had both met Michael Palin and appear in his Himalaya series.


An old geezer in Doctor Ho's village Baisha, near Lijiang, with the aforementioned 5600m-high Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the background