After a 10 hour train journey in a hard seat in a very full train, we made it to Lijiangdong, the nearest station to the Old City of Lijiang.

When you get off the train, there is no much choice on what to do, you must take a taxi, if you are lucky, or what we did was find a guy who spoke a bit of English. He was outside of one of the many blue mini buses which is for 5 Yuan (£0.50) – they take you to the Old City centre.

We booked a guest house this time, hostels weren’t available, called Old Garden Resort. The location was great, in an alley just next to the big Crowne Plaza Hotel. At the beginning I was a bit scared of the place because it was just a dark alley, but then I realised that our alley was great. If we were going to book a place more deep in the Old City centre we would have had a hard time trying to find our way… Lijiand Old city centre is a combination of so many allies – it’s impossible not to get lost!

Considered a Unesco World Heritage Place, Lijiang’s Old City Centre is an 800 year old Naxi little town. You can still see the Naxi Minority people around the city, however they no longer live there because it is very expensive now, and the city became a very touristic place. And no wonder why, Lijiang is by far one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen! The houses are so beautiful, inside they have amazing gardens, full of colour. Outside the house are all following the same pattern, white with wooden windows and doors, the roofs all grey, having that typical Chinese form, and there are red lamps everywhere.

Streets are all made of stone, with small rivers in some of the alleys, wooden and stone bridges connecting one alley with the other, some old water mills turning around and making the most relaxing sound, it was just unbelievable!

The only down thing is that big groups of tourists made the small streets a bit crowded, specially if you are here during the weekend! Also there is a tax of 80 Yuan (£7.70) per person that goes to the Lijiang town hall. Later on I found out that you don’t have to pay the tax if you don’t want to, but it was too late….the fact that there were a lot of tour operators with no English speaking staff was a bit annoying too, we wanted to organize some day trips, and honestly we couldn’t do it from Lijiang.

We spoke with several backpackers, we all agreed that even though the city is lovely, the fact that there is such a big concentration of tourists makes it really annoying to go there. A lot of people actually recommended Dali, which is the city before Lijiang if you take the train from Kunming.

To be continued…