Charming Yunnan: Day 04a Shangri La

Zhongdian is situated at an altitude of 3160m. Zhongdian was renamed as "Shangri-La" a few years back to promote tourism. The town itself is nothing special. It comprises of mainly modern building in mock Tibetan style. However, there is an interest old section to the south of the town, which is not marked in any of the tourist maps. (We were asking the hotel staff for interesting places to go in the evening and a bellboy recommended us to go there. When we were there, there was a big group of Tibetans and Chinese dancing at the main square, and it was spontaneous and quite authentic (i.e. not "performed" for tourist). There was a woman dancing while carrying her baby!

We stayed one night at Zhongdian and left the next morning to head for Meili Snow Mountain. Enroute, we saw Napa Hai, a seasonal lake at the outskirt of Zhongdian, as well as the First Bend of Jinsha Jiang, Dongzhulin Temple and BaiMang Snow Mountain which are shown in the next two blogs. The scenery along the road is simply breadthtaking, with roads contours around high mountains and deep valleys below you.

This region is actually a UNESCO World Heritage site known as the "Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas" where three of the great rivers of Asia, the Yangtze (Jinsha Jiang), Mekong (Lancang Jiang) and Salween (Nu Jiang) run roughly parallel, north to south, through steep gorges which, in places, are 3,000 m deep and are bordered by glaciated peaks more than 6,000 m high.

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1. Zhongdian is surrounded by mountains