Journey to Meili Snow Mountain Viewpoint

After heading out of Shangri-La through the surrounding wild-west-style countryside we reached a viewpoint over the plains and the often-dry Napa Lake...even when its wet it is only a metre or so deep so in reality it should probably be called Napa Puddle. Pretty despite the name.

Next stop, we dropped down a few hundred metres to cross over the Yangstee at the bottom of a steep sided valley. The (only) road then crawled up the mountainsides, sticking to the very edges with double-bends galore. Up through the beautiful autumn colours and on little bridges over mountain streams with the speedo of our Chevy ex-Bank of China can barely making it past 20mph at any point.

For lunch we ate at a restaurant belonging to one of Xin's friends in Benzi Lan, where we ate a selection of dishes including a fried pork ribs dish which had a great taste, but we're yet to find out what went into it frustratingly.

Moon bowl bend was just a little further up the road - allegedly the first bend on the River Yangstee, though I find it a little hard to swallow that the earlier hundred-plus kilometres run straight as if built by the Romans! First bend that Chinese Tour Busses can be bothered to go to makes more sense. The bend was impressive though, even if the mountainsides were a bit grey and barren.

Winding our way up further into the autumnal-coloured mountains we eventually reached the pass at Bamang Snow Mountain at a height of 4290m - and still the mountains towered over us on either side. The icy-cold desolate nature of the site was interrupted by the multicoloured Tibetan-Budhhist prayer flags, complete with the scrolls printed on them, which were strung up all over the mountain-edge. Xin told us they were here, close to the sky so that God(s?) can read them. Each colour stood for something too with blue meaning water, white signifying cloud, red calling for the power of fire, green keeping people in touch with the earth and yellow asking my friend where the answer be a-blowing. Slightly more surprising than the colours of the prayer flags were the Tibetan-Buddhist methods of burial. These amounted to fire, earth, water, sky and maybe another. Fire and earth are self-explanatory, but water and sky were a little disturbing. They both involved hacking the corpse into bit-size chunks and either dropping it into the local lake or river (for the fishes to eat?!) or leaving it on a mountain top (for eagles and buzzards to consume). A photographer-friend of Xin's had seen the preparation for a sky burial once, following which he was unable to eat for four days!

We then dropped down through the pass, again gripping the sides of the mountains en route to our stop for the night at the North Star Inn at the Feilai Temple viewing platform for Meili Snow Mountain. Our trip was slowed a little by what is apparently "typical Tibetan attitude" - stopping a truck right in the middle of the road for unloading, leaving no option for people trying to get by - sounds like Africa!

Much to our amusement we found out that night that ginger sweet water, brown sugar tea, ginger tea and ginger coke all fall into the same class of drink as vodka redbull - an anti-altitude reaction drink...drink enough and you'll forget you're at altitude making cliff-top walks perilous??!

Sheltering in the warmth of the restaurant that night we had our Emergency China Crisis Assembly. The problem - on trying to figure out our schedule for doing the backdoor route we suddenly realized we were going to end up with nearly four days sat on a bus with only about two quarter-days for sightseeing. That didn't sound like a holiday. After looking at four different options it seemed a 13-hour nightbus followed by a 14-hour train journey was the best route to Chengdu and from then on we'd use flights as they weren't much more expensive than trains and a damned lot quicker! Plus this way we got to stay an extra day to visit the glacier.