January 21-22 - Lugu Lake

The bus ride from Lijiang to Lugu Lake cannot be adequately portrayed in a blog. In brief, most would agree on these three: painful, scary and long. Similar to my flight from Kunming to Lijiang, if one flew directly to the lake, it would take probably twenty minutes at most. The terrain, as you can see in the photo slideshow (below), doesn't allow for the smoothest and straightest of highways. We were all bewildered by the view of the winding, rocky "trails" (I darenot call them roads) until it sank in, maybe by the second or third hillside, that it would continue like this for the next six hours. The paths were intentionally rocky and unrefined to provide better tire traction, which is a compromise but a blessing considering there are no guardrails that separate us in a minibus from the 100m near-vertical cliffs. All it would take is a slight overturn of the steering wheel or the driver to nod off for a second to send us all on our way down before our time. This trip was no joke, and because of the jagged road surface, reading, listening to music, or even hearing each other was out of the range of possibility, leaving us nothing better to do than hold on tight and enjoy the view. Not surprisingly, we blew a tire and had to make a pit stop in a more populous town. Also along the way, we passed through several ethnic Yi villages, which sadly, I didn't have much time to learn about, rather only stop and use their bathrooms every couple hours.

When finally catching a glimpse of the lake, I was immediately reminded of two mountainous freshwater lakes I had been to before - Crater Lake in SW Oregon and Lake Ometepe in Nicaragua. We went down the the water with our bus group and found two boatmen offering to paddle us across the lake to an island with a Buddhist temple and some tombs. On the slow but relaxing ride, I learned that Chinese people do not share the same comtempt for seagulls as most Westerners, and brought chunks of old bread to lure them near and take pictures of them.

It was later back at the guestlodge that I made another discovery. From the moment my day started on the bus at sunrise to dinnertime at sunset, the only spoken english I had heard came from Wangyang or myself. As everyone was deliberating dinnerplans, my translator... ahem, I mean bilingual companion was in the shower and I was in the dark as far as plans were concerned. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, two of them came up to me and asked in not too shabby english if I planned on joining them for dinner or waiting for my friend. I almost fell off the bed, and spent the next ten minutes retracing my every conversation that day to make sure I didn't say anything too offensive that day.

Keep in mind, the lake itself was only one reason to make the hellish journey from Lijiang. This land is better known as... the free sex kingdom of China. Before you get any ideas ("how could he sink that low!"), know this - foreigners aren't included. We're invited to sing and dance, but that's as far as it goes. The region is inhabited by members of the Mosuo ethnic minority, a splinter of the Naxi people with similar matriarchal social structure, but a twist in the love department. Here's an interesting excerpt from a German travel site on the "free love" deal:

Marriage free - "Azhu" Lovers
Mosuo People are marriage-free. When the Mosuo girls reached 15 years of age, the boys reached 17, they are allowed to start their love affairs. The lovers (Called "Female Azhu" and "male Azhu") found each other freely. Mosuo people are good in singing and dancing. The young people dancing together and singing in Musou language to express their love.
The Musou girl has a special "Azhu" house to meet her lover. Her lover visits her during night and leave at morning.If the girl wishes to stop the love affair, she closed the door of her "Azhu House" to the man. Then the man will not come again. The love affair is finished. The lovers have no economic or any legal relationship. It is based on mutual love affection only. The wiliness of the females are very respected.

We attended a couple social events that night, the last of which was simply a covered edifice with a hundred Chinese visitors crowded around galbi/hibachi-style table grills, trading off drinking songs. Some, as I was told, were tributes to the communist party, another was the national anthem. The funniest moment was when they saw me and noticed I wasn't singing along, so they all chanted in unison, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G... H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P!" Parts of the song/alphabet were a little off, but I left my gradebook in Seoul, so who's checking? Each drinking song ended with a chant that we still haven't been able to translate, "Yaksok! Yaksok! Yak Yak Sok!" I trust that it wasn't anything too offensive, because we joined in the chanting wherever we could figure out what was going on.

The next morning we woke up before dawn to catch the sunrise over the lake. 6:40am is not exactly the warmest hour in the Tibetan foothills in January. I wore just about every layer I brought with me (2 t-shirts, 1 long sleeve shirt, 2 sweaters, and a hoodie), and was still chilly until the sun came around. The lake started to get brighter and a fisherman was already out in the water, but we couldn't see the crest of the sun until 8:30. As the photos show, it was well worth the wait.

Lugu Lake Photos