It is the National holiday in China from Oct 1st to Oct 8th. This year is more "special" since it is the 60-year anniversary of CCP taking over China. They make it such a big deal here of course especially the army marching thing which made the whole China so proud of it except me and some of my friends who think that's totally extremely STUPID since the only other country in the planet doing this is NK. Well, It is really something to be PROUD of anymore. It is a sign that my country want to show an announce of militarism by its goofy power to the rest of the world, to me. I don't know if it's the same to my other 1.4 billion folks.

Anyway, I want to talk about something else. We spent 4 days 6 nights in a trip to Nujiang where is on the northwest corner in Yunnan where borders Burma, Tibet and Shangrila, another county of Yunnan. We took sleeper bus to the capital city, Liuku（六库）the first night, just came back last night by sleeper bus too. It is really bad experience to take sleeper bus in Yunnan, or in China. It's not comfortable at all but it's popular since cheap and convienant. Well. Let's go through our trip from Liuku.

D1 From Kunming to Liuku by sleeper bus

D2 Liuku 六库

the view out our window in Liuku.

 
motor gang in the street, typical Yunnan frontier town style

 
a commie style bridge, it says 毛主席万岁—long life Chairman Mao, 万岁here means long life, literally it means 10,000 years, thank god it was just a wish...





there is a little animal market on the head of the bridge, to our surprise we found a pair of owls, they looked just like wood when stand still. They must be wild from the mountains around the town. The seller tried to wake them up when we were going to take pics of them. These two sleepy heads began to open their wide, crimson eyes. It was a creepy but also amazing moment really, their eyes were so big that almost not belong to them. When they were totally opened, I felt sad for them. Those two little owls with weird, scary but beautiful big red eyes, they were so small, probably still babies, their life supposed to be in the forest beside that huge angry river. Is it legal to sell this kind of animals?


same question for this animal, it looks like a lesser panda

Cross bows for sell, Lisu people which is the main minority live in this area still hunt for living. Those are the bows they use.
 
left old hunter(or seller?)try to teach young genaration how to use it. right arrows



Lisu woman, the commie hat is very popular here, you can see it everywhere. It is the influnce from Han people during Mao time. People still worship him there.

 
Nujiang and the view of the town from the other side of the river.



It looked modern from this angle



stairs lead us to a temple

beach by the river

another bridge


D3 From Liuku to Bingzhongluo 丙中洛, the most north of Nujiang, by bus

half way




It is a long way from Liuku to Bingzhongluo, it is only 260 km but took us almost 10 hours since it is all mountain roads against the cliff by the river.



View out of our window in Bingzhongluo, we stayed at a hostel called De La mu Leech, it is a cool name right? Leech, wow. On the back side of the name card of the hostel, there is a leech printed even.

the leech hostel and the street where it locates

Bingzhongluo town in fog

mountains around the town are just like Chinese traditional paintings, huh?

Then we felt so hungry suddenly, listen to hostel owner's advice we went to a restaurant to have some bite.

Local trait, wasp maggots!!!!! which were still moving and the owner of the restaurant recommended to us strongly who said it's soooooooooooo good but we'd rather skip.

our meal, simple but delicious, 2 dishes, 1 soup, with rice

this purple thing is called yeshanyao, wild mountain herb, it tasted like potato, the soup with it was great

Bill looked happy after feed.


D4 Hang around Bingzhongluo by bicycle
The next morning after breakfast we decided to rent bicycles to ride to the direction further into the mountains.
There's a village called Chongding we supposed to stay over night but gave up since it rained too hard the day before and it was half hour walking from Bingzhongluo. We will check it out by bikes today.

our bicycle
me

started from there


a temple not far from the town which looked obvious Tibetan style with a nice looking stupa, it's too bad it's locked. We can only stick our camera to take this photo

a baby calf was trapped in the temple



 
mushrooms

 
huge local spiders which really freaked somebody out


Nu people village, Nu is the other main minority in Nujiang, their name is from this river





We got a chance to go down to the beach of Nujiang river




a old bridge called Chaohong

it looked so old that almost like from horror movies, in a cool way of course

or from Indiana Jones ^__^


slide in half way

Looked like some home made hydroelectric generation?

I just had a flat tire in this village



eat and have a rest

rough looking local orange



 
a guy from the restaurant tried to solve the problem for me  and a pet monkey they have

Bill in front of Atujia, the restaurant where we got food and help


hey hey hey chill out man, this is in the middle of some road by cliff okay?

After the tire's fixed, we decided to head back in case it got flat again.


Chongding village
Chongding Church

Well, we really wanted to visit this church closer but somehow there are walls around it and the gate was locked. The key keeper is called Ding dama(grandma Ding) who was pretty famous since her story was in a very famous documentary called Delamu, she is also the first hostel runner in this area. Ding dama really has bad temper, the first time we went by her house and try to persuade her opening the gate for us, she got so mad because we rode bicycle in to her yard!! She scolded me pretty harsh as if I killed her dog, then refuse to open the gate for us, she said, I haven't have breakfast yet, and also if you guy want to visit it one by one, I will be tired to death, just come back at 13:00, there will be a bunch people want to see it. I replied, sorry we have a long way to ride, I am not sure if we can make it at 13:00. She said then 4 or 5 is okay. Then she kicked me out of her yard.

Ding dama was yelling at me

After we head back and passed by Chongding village, we checked Dingdama's hostel again, this time I walked in instead of riding bicycle to avoid provoking her again. She and her son were home, I requested it again. She didn't even want to talk to me, her son said something like the police came over and took the key away, we have to wait. We waited for a while to realize they didn't want us to see it at all. It is no point to fight with such a grumpy and tough looking woman. We gave up and rode back to the town in rain.

It is really a nice church with some interesting story, it was built by a French priest in 30's last century who was burried in the grave yard of the church in 1936. It was destroyed during Cultural revolution, then rebuilt in 1996.

We just felt so frustrated the church became a personal property of somebody really desired to use to have power over people. As we know people live in this river, Lisu, Nu, a lot of them  are catholic, what if villagers want to pray? It is good for a church to be locked( by a mean woman, or not ) all the time?

It's the biggest pity in this trip.



D5 Back to Liuku by bus, stopped at a town called Fugong, night bus from Liuku to Kunming




  market in Fugong




baby wasp sell for food!! They are still live and moving...


ripe persimmons


bridge in Fugong

That is almost the whole trip. Time is tight this time so we missed a couple of cool spots but it is basically a good trip. One thing about Nujiang is it's definitely better to travel in winter time because in winter time the river is a beautiful greenish blue. The season we were there is not long after rain season so water looked not so pretty. It rained for days so the sky is not clear either. But it is cool also to see smoky cloud wondering around mountains I guess.