Yubeng Villages and the Sacred Waterfall

The following morning we get up before sunrise and meet our group at the trail head. The workers are just waking up, and before too long the Han tourists will be behind us. It is chilly up there, but after just five minutes of hiking the trail turns into a sharp incline. The elevation and lack of breakfast makes for a very tough initiation. One of the girls from Poland quits. After an hour the trail is still going uphill and seems like it won't stop; so we decide to rest and get some nourishment at the first shack we see.
This shed has livestock running around, fruit for sale, and an older Tibetan couple apparently living out of the humble store front. Other than some flat bread and fruit and snickers we share a pot of yak butter tea. The pot turns out to be so plentiful that we all drink our share and still fill a large water bottle- which I proceed to drink the rest of the way up for energy. Yak butter tea tastes kind of like the milk left after eating cereal heated up, and is one of the things I miss most from Western China. We climb up, up, up for a good three hours until we finally reach the summit and can see our destination.
We had hiked to the top of a hill over looking the valley which holds Upper and Lower Yubeng Villages. Our plan was to make it to Lower Yubeng, find a place to sleep, eat, then hike to the scared waterfall. The hike down was pleasant and exciting. Although the later in the morning it got, the more the Han tourists started to appear.
As I mentioned in previous posts, we were traveling during National Holiday Week which is a time when many Chinese travel- a time one should avoid traveling. We watched prices go up throughout the week in hostels, restraunts, and transportation. We hoped to get away from the bussel of Chinese tourism, and to an extent we did. But it was still quite present. At the trail head I saw hoards of rich Han men and women decked out in North Face and Columbia gear- jacket, pants, layers, boots, hat, back pack, and walking stick. I was surprised how prepared some of them looked, although one could tell a store clerk in Shanghai or Beijing made quite a few sales offering unnessecary gear. I was quite impressed with the tourists intent though.
I should have known better. After hiking an hour or two we started being passed by all these Han- on donkeys. Wearing all their pricey gear and water proof boots, Tibetans lead them in hoards on donkeys up the trail with a few donkeys in the rear wearing their backpacks. I had heard the Chinese see no reason to struggle against nature, and their idea of tourism is only to reach the destination- this exemplified these ideas. They had the money to get all the way out here, and they did not feel like walking over this mountain either. Besides the donkeys (and the late night drinking songs) the Han tourists were not a problem. We reached Lower Yubeng a little after noon and promptly searched for a room. Most of the places were charging more than we wanted to pay (still under $10), but we bargained our way into paying about $3 to sleep in a hallway on matresses. We ate large bowls of fried rice and were headed to the waterfall before 2:00. The trail mousied along the valley by a creek for away. The forest was dense and green and cool. Many stones balancing on each other or prayer flags lined the trail, and eventually we started going uphill again. Near the end a few of us ventured off the trail and explored the ice at the foot of the mountain. Streams carved tunnels through the glacier which offered a unique hole to venture into. We basically spent the afternoon playing at the foot of the mountain.

Although we could see it for quite a awhile, we eventually made it up to the water fall. There were dozens strewn across the mountain's landscape, but this once in particular was certainly the most grand. Chris and I were the first at it's foot and watched a family run around in it for awhile. It was way too cold for us to do the same, and later learned it was for superstition. To run three times clockwise around the waterfall gives you good luck for the following year; we watched a father carrying his child through it crying, and then dry off by a smoking urn.
We returned pretty worn out from a very full day of hiking. A slow dinner and short evening until we were ready for bed. I slept quite soundly granted we were in the middle of a hallway with heavy traffic. The next day we planned to hike out and get as close to Kunming as possible.
So here is how we got home. Woke up at sunrise and hiked out. Got to the trailhead before noon and had met a man from Shanghai would offered us a ride to Deqin for free. However we found a ride to Shangri-la for about $60 and that was as good as we would get- even from Deqin. With few stops we got to the Shangri-la bus station at about 6:50PM. Immediately we were able to catch a sleeper bus to Kunming under the table, or something. We sat for two hours in the floor on one sleeper bus, and in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night were switched to another bus. Our bed was in the back, and the three of us shared it with two other Chinese men for the remaining 10 hours. The bed was just wide enough to lay, too short for me, and we were unable to even sit up. The men smoked cigarettes and the back gets the worst bumps.
We arove in Kunming 5:30 and got another bus to the train station. From there we there was a long search for an ATM which accepted our cards, and we commenced to book a train to Shanghai.
At Shanghai we had to wait for two hours until the ticket offices opened, and finally caught a train to Hangzhou. It almost felt like home when the cab pull up to our dorms.