Southwest China Field Trip: Scaling Jade Dragon Snow Mountain
All this week, Jaunted special embed Claire Duffett will be relaying the joys and jumbles of her travels through Southwest China including Tibet. Today, discovering Lijiang and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain :
Lijiang is indisputably remarkable as a town in Southwest China. Because of its charm and attractions, it’s also packed with tourists. The old town is a hodgepodge of ancient Chinese buildings, topped with low, ceramic roofs and connected by a series of narrow walkways all flanked by open waterways where crystal clear water flows from Jade Dragon Snow Mountain looming above.
It seems every other doorway leads to a guesthouse with small, wooden rooms surrounding a garden courtyard. Few cost more than $15 per night. This is the first place in Yunnan, heading up from the capital of Kunming, where elevation gains might make you drowsy. And for those heading farther north to Shangri-La and into Tibet, it’s nice to start adjusting to the thin air, slowly.
Beyond wandering the town and sipping cups of overpriced coffee on verandas overlooking the collection of rooftops, visiting Jade mountain is one of the areas main activities. There, for a hefty price (about US$60 after various fees) you can ride a cable car to the top of the mountain.
While many tourists pay to rent parkas and buy bottled oxygen for the trip, Jaunted readers are strong enough to suck it up. Do it—it’s not that cold at 5,000 meters, the mountain’s peak, unless you’re there in the dead of winter, and you’re not up there long enough to get altitude sickness. The hordes sucking on Oxygen tanks struck us as a bit silly as we, unathletic New York hipsters, bounded from our cable carriage up the wooden stairs to the peak.
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