The 5 Best Ancient Ruins in Yulong County, Yunnan

Reviewed By ggm96822 - Honolulu, United States

The second great bend of the Yangzi is inaccessible by road, but not far downstream is the last walled village in China, Bao Shan, a very old Naxi village 130 km from Lijiang, translated as "Stone Town" because of its distinctive architecture, foundations of the houses carved into the steep cliff. Since I wanted to see more of the mountains and more Naxi villages, and my Naxi taxi driver from the Shigu trip seemed up for it, we settled on 600¥ for a round trip. We covered approximately 100 km in first two hours, very scenic, thick pine forests, long-tailed birds fluttering by, meadows and mountain streams, small villages, rice, potatoes and corn being harvested in the narrow fields. The road gradually worsened, switchbacks up into and down out of the clouds, enough altitude change that my ears would pop, occasional road damage from landslides but nearly no traffic. Then the next hour the side road was more problematic, a one lane road with two way traffic and no shoulder, in fact the road surface was raised so leaving the road even a few inches would be disastrous, hairpin turns, many fresh landslides (it was raining every night in October), mostly just rocks but some parts of hillside with entire pine trees in them, places where the outer edge of the road had collapsed down the cliff, cracks where the road surface had shifted, I was thinking that this might be a candidate for the worse road I had ever been on, but that was before the road got really bad, basically a rock donkey path (there were in fact donkeys on it), fortunately only one car coming the other way for the 15 km stretch, ruts on which we bottomed out and I began to think that the taxi, a VW Lavida, was not going to survive, flooded sections of flowing red mud, but the driver would laugh each time we scraped or thumped something, he would navigate the worst turns in first gear, and when, 4 hours after leaving Lijiang, we reached Baoshan, he said something in Naxi that I interpreted as "I bet you thought we would never get here," which was true. I recommend hiking those last 15 km.