Ripped Off and Jaded in Naxi-land

How horribly wrong the LP can be... especially in China.

For starters, it couldn't be done. If we wanted to go from Chengdu via Lugu Hu lake on the way to Lijiang, we would have to take all provisions, a tent and a sleeping bag... but then Lugu Hu is very sleepy and practically untouched. No one told that to the hundreds of Chinese tourists, and no one at the bus station got the memo either.

We caught an over night train from Chengdu to Xichang, got straight onto a bus, and arrived at Lugu Hu without starving or sleeping in the wild. Then we paid 80 yuan each (about AUD$16!!) to get into the bloody lake. This better be good.

No, no it wasn't. All the taxis at Lugu Hu town were price fixed to 20 yuan per person to go about 5 k's around the lake to the 'sleepy' little town of Lige... this was annoying right from the start as the 8 hour bus ride from Xichang to Lugu Hu was only 67 yuan each. To make matters worse, the taxi driver drove like a freaking maniac on the loose gravel, winding mountain roads (I think he actually sped up for the hair-pin corners), and when we pleaded with him to slow down he literally turned around in his seat to look at us and cackled like a mad man. Finally, he pulled over at a look out and got out of the car. We thought he was kindly stopping for us to a) kick him in the balls, or b) take a photo. No... apparently the car couldn't make it all the way down to Lige as it was too dangerous (Hello? Slow down!), but we can walk down this steep embankment here through all the nettle bushes, and walk the remaining 800 metres to the guesthouse... that's what all the tourists do!

The 'sleepy town' of Lige may well have been this way 4 years ago (although we seriously doubt this), but it was now a mass construction site of bland wooden "old Naxi" houses.

OK, where here now, what can we do? Well, we could get one of the Naxi women to row us in a little boat around the cove (not the lake mind you) for 10 yuan per person which would take about 20 minutes. Or we could pay 150 yuan to go to one of the islands in the middle. Or we can join in with a traditional Naxi dance for 10 yuan per person. Traditional Naxi dance my ass... they played a tape of their songs on the boom box, walked around in a circle with the gullable Chinese tourists... and checked their mobiles.

Lugu Hu wasn't even that pretty. The surrounding mountains had red soil and sparce vegetation, so for us it looked very much like Australia (not a bad thing, but we've seen it before... for free), but I can understand that for the Chinese tourists it's very different.

The one great thing about Lugu Hu was the company. We met a little ball of energy and enthusiasm called Jing, and she made our time there a lot more bearable. The other good thing about the whole Lugu Hu fiasco (apart from leaving it the next day), was the thought that we didn't wait until we had already arrived in Lijiang before taking a full 9 hours to get up there and find it was shit.

[NB: when we arrived in Lijiang, we found a 2003 edition of the Rough Guide which detailed exactly the situation in Lugu Hu, and if we had read that we wouldn't have bothered.]