Shaxi-Quiet and Undiscovered

As small and beautiful as our town of Lijiang is, we have come to realize how significant its tourism infrastructure is. The Old Town is flooded with "western" restaurants and full of Chinese tour groups dutifully following their guide who is holding a flag for visual identification. Most days we are glad to live a few miles north of the hubbub. We have been yearning to find someplace authentic and unaffected by tourism.

Of course authentic meant 2.5 hours by bus to the dusty town of Jianchuan and then another hour of excruciating bumps and potholes to reach Shaxi. Shaxi is nestled in a large valley full of rice and rape fields, and small villages. Its ancient market square still has the original town temple (guarded by two very large and very fierce looking red and blue gods) and theater. Every Friday the market square comes alive with Bai and Yi people. There is an animal market set up outside the town gates to accommodate the livestock trade.

We gladly stumbled out of our bright purple bus and followed a cobblestone alley to the first guest house we found. Our proprietor was a local Bai man who had 10 rooms in his traditional Bai courtyard house. As we were the only guests we got to browse through the vegetable selection to chose our dinner and hang out in the kitchen while it was being prepared. We spent a lot of time sitting in the courtyard drinking tea. Early the next morning I wandered around town with our two traveling companions taking pictures at first light. The town still boasts two of it's original gates and plenty of ancient architecture. Our host took us into some old courtyard houses and showed us into nooks and crannies. We spent a good part of the day on a 10K walk to an old stone bridge south of town. We walked through many villages and fields and answered numerous hellos. We finally found the bridge which is one of the original throughfares of the Silk Road (locally called the Tea Horse Caravan). Li played poohsticks while everyone else rested in the shade. We managed to cram into a minivan full of locals to avoid the 10K walk back and discovered the best cappuccino I have had in all of China in the market square. We drank coffee and watched kids running around playing.

The next day we returned to Jianchuan and wandered the old town which is also full of 200-300 year old architecture. Steve, Li and I stumbled onto a family making incense and watched the process while communicating in broken Chinese. Needless to say the entire process is by hand.

I thought I was getting to be an old hand at Chinese bus rides but I was still startled by the woman who loaded six 30 gallon burlap bags full of vegetables (the one nearest me was garlic) and three 40 gallon barrels of fish all into the aisle of our small bus. Emergency exit? Not. The aroma of fish and garlic combined with 2.5 hours of winding mountain roads was overpowering. Every time the bus took a sharp corner the fish buckets sloshed and splashed. I have never been so delighted to get off a bus!

Nevertheless Shaxi is a gem and still the real thing. Two nights lodging, two dinners and one breakfast for all three of us ran a whopping $17. Excellent cappuccino in the market square for breakfast-priceless!