Remembering China

KANGDING! The town of Kangding is situated in a river valley with huge cliffs defining the limits. Kangding was not on our list of towns to stay in for very long, but Charles and I ended up loving it. The Zhilam Hostel is one of the main reasons we enjoyed our stay so much. We found out that the owner used to live in Portland, Oregon so of course Charles had a lot to talk about with him. The staff was incredibly helpful. One day we actually got in a taxi and ended up leaving town on accident when we were just trying to get to the bus stop! The taxi driver called the hostel to translate our desired destination. The beds were comfortable, internet worked, and the Yak burgers were great!

here is a link to read more about the hostel:

American family runs hostel in Kangding, SW China

The photos of the 'Mountain Pony Ride' are from Litang. The little girl is the daughter of the hostel owner where we were staying. She was incredibly cute and our guide was very nice. The whole ride we translated, via pointing at objects, into tibetan with our guide: saddle, horse, dog, mane, hoof, reins, brother, sister, I think you get the idea. The only words I remember are MayMay and GuGew. Little sister and big brother, respectively. They actually came in handy a lot!

Litang is rather infamous in our minds as well because we got stuck there! Or was it Dali? You know it's hard to remember now! But in one of these towns, we ran out of physical cash and none of the bank machines in the town worked. We got so low on funds that we couldn't even pay a taxi driver to take us to a place where we could get more money. How did we get out of it? I luckily was carrying two hundred US dollars, rather randomly, which we took to the bank to try to exchange but they wouldn't change it. After another game of desperate charades by Charles (he got quite good at them by the end of this trip) they lady behind the glass felt so bad for us that she called her father, a business man, and he came and bought the 200 USD. He even gave us a pretty good exchange rate. We were incredibly lucky! My advice for traveling in this region of China, make sure you have extra funds because not every town will have bank machines!