Day 14: Lijiang (麗江) to Lugu Hu (瀘沽湖)

We caught a bus this morning to Lugu Hu lake an area that is inhabited by the Mosuo tribe, which is close to Tibetan Buddhist, however in this tribe men are the lowest on the social scale.  Traditionally men work but the women of the family control the money and each night the women decide if they which tribal man they want to have sexual relations with.  This continues until a woman becomes pregnant and the man and woman form a bond, however there is no marriage the child is raised only by the woman's family, while the men stay in their own families home.  The lowest part of the society is the child's new uncle who raises the male children instead of their father.  From what we saw the men being the lowest part of society means working during the day and smoking, drinking and playing cards with other men at night, without any family responsibilities.

Anyway, our bus picked us up at 8am and it said it was an 9 hour ride, which seemed strange since it wasn't that far on the map.  What we didn't know is the bus would stop for pictures and for lunch.

A stop at the top of a mountain for pictures

Fog rolled in very fast

At lunch Charlotte bought food from this traditional woman

After about 5 hours, of which only about 3 were driving, the driver announced that because of a mudslide a couple days ago (which we later would find out had killed 3 locals), we would have to get off the bus, hike through the mud and get picked up on the other side by another bus.  Now besides us the bus was full of upper middle class Chinese wearing nice clothes and some in high heels with rolling suitcases, we confirmed later that no one had been told this was going to happen, however it didn't seem to phase them at all.  I guess random things like this happen quite a bit in China.  Everyone grabbed their bags and hiked a 1/4 of a mile through the mud and got picked up on the other side.

Hiking down the mudslide

Thinking we were going to a nicer resort area I wore nice shoes...luckily mud comes off easily

More mud

The bus that picked us up brought us to more site seeing, then to a place where we had an option of going on a 2 hour traditional canoe ride or sit and wait for the others to finish, so we paid and went.  One interesting thing on the trip was while it was no surprise the Buddhist native rowing our boat didn't have anything nice to say about the Communist party (he simply refused to comment when a Chinese tourist asked), a Chinese tourist did say that no one really likes the Communist party anymore and no one on the boat disagreed with him.

Finally got to the lake!

But before checking in some boating

Charlotte on the boat when we stopped at an island

A high level monk lives on the 2nd floor of this house on an island

On the boat ride back

Our boat driver

And the drivers pet bird

A picture of the boats with the lake

Finally we got dropped off at the area with our hostel around 5 pm, a 4-5 hour drive lasted about 9 hours.  Then checked into our hostel which we picked because a friend knows the owner.  The lobby was very nice so we were excited, however the owner hadn't been there for months and it showed when we got to our room.  It was a very nice room, however it seems like it hadn't been cleaned well in a while and had broken windows, spider webs and doors duct taped together and they said we couldnt change rooms because they were totally booked.  So while it did look nice, we decided it wasn't worth the extra money and decided to only stay 1 night at this hostel.

Then we went out and got BBQ Yak, where you grill it yourself, it was good, but having never had Yak before and not being sure how to cook it, we overcooked quite a bit of it.  While we were there we watched the local men drink and smoke consistently