Lunar New Year Extravaganza: Lijiang (丽江)

Posted on February 8th, 2009 by james

The historic city of Lijiang is one of those places that look so amazing in post cards, no matter how much money you drain on Canon L glass, no matter how well your Photoshop skills can edit Jessica Alba’s head on some porno model’s body, no matter how many grams of mushrooms you eat, you’ll never be able to capture its magic in that camera of yours. There might be a slight correlation between that unlikelihood and how it’s been transformed into a giant tourist trap.

Yes it does eat tourists, and by the thousands. But compared to any other normal Chinese city Lijiang is a breath of fresh air both literally and figuratively. I’m going to admit straight up that I liked Lijiang. From my careful research on the matter, people are polarized on it. They either see it as a tourist inferno, an unending gauntlet of knick knack shops stocked with mass made merchandise straight from the forge of hell, OR as a window into another time and a great place to kick it for the weekend. I fell into the later group because, once you get over the touristness, it’s actually very relaxing, with an endless supply of cafes, restaurants and bars. Even though it’s 100% geared towards visitors, there is a complete lack of the “lOOKa lOOka, WATCH BAG DVD” crowd. The town is well planned, there’s a dedicated bar street that’s in the west end, restaurants and cafes are strewn about everywhere and guest houses, hotels and hostels are in the east. This minimizes the eternal battle between the awesome drunken hooligans and the all-powerful army of people who want to get some fucking sleep.

With the unstoppable juggernaut of modernization, it was only a matter of time before it was transformed into what it is today, or bulldozed to make way for factories and condos. Sadly there just isn’t any money in ancient Chinese towns that don’t whore themselves out in some way. So I prefer it’s current existence to the wrecking ball. I realize that there are some disneyesque qualities about it, but it isn’t entirely fake. For example you still see people who live in the old town washing their clothes in the brooks that crisscross the coble stone streets. The naxi food is different from regular Chinese food in a very good way. I’m not so sure how authentic it is because I’ve never had it anywhere else, but I do know that the Naxi sandwich (with naxi bread, not regular toast) is a badass motherfucker. It’s actually probably a good thing that you’ve got places bling’d out like this mainly for tourism, because it might pull attention away from the smaller towns that want to keep their souls. Apart from the not so real aspect, the only thing I didn’t really like was the inflated prices for everything in the old town. If you’re planning on spending time there, do yourself a big favor and buy all your snacks, foods and booze in the new town, you’ll probably save about a quarter. And you can put that money towards a neat trip outside of the town…like…say…Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Things you should do in the “beautiful river”:

Eat a real naxi sandwich

Eat some naxi cakes for breakfast (the ones with honey)

Try drinking some Salima (drink some for me, my poor bottle was stolen by a penisless taxi driver)

Take a walk down bar street and wonder why this little city of 300 odd thousand has this many bars and the city you live in of roughly 7 million has less. Cry.

Chill out in a cafe and drink some Yunnan coffee, then get so wired that you go…

…rent a bike, ride up the big hill to the north east of the city and check out some REAL naxi houses with courtyards, the real naxi market, and maybe score some real naxi food.

Dump some bodies in the river and survey people’s reactions as they float by.