After breakfast at Peter’s Cafe, we hire bikes from one of the many bike hire operators which line the street outside the hotel. The morning is fine and cool, and we cycle out of town towards the Jade Dragon Mountain, which is clear apart from a wisp of grey cloud wrapped around its glaciated summit. The road runs dead straight towards a low pass through the hills to the right of the mountain, but after an hour or so of cycling, we decide that the village we are looking for, Baisha, home of the legendary herbalist Doctor Hu, lies in another direction, so we turn around and coast back down to the edge of town.
A bumpy dirt road leads off at an angle from the main road, so we follow it across a flat plain where oxen are drawing ploughs through the thick red soil, preparing it for autumn planting. It is very pleasant cycling through this Arcadian scene, and we stop several times to rest and watch the rural activity around us, which, even though it is important and hard work for the farmers, seems to be conducted with an air of unhurried gracefulness.
At Baisha, we stop for a rest among the small walled compounds of the houses, where corn cobs hang in bright yellow clusters from black wooden racks, and piles of corn stalks are rowed up along the margins of the village. Doctor Hu is unforthcoming, which doesn’t worry us unduly, so we begin the journey back through the fields. Halfway back towards town, we stop for our lunch. At Peter’s Cafe we had purchased a beef sandwich, a chicken sandwich and two boiled eggs, beside the road. It is warm and pleasant sitting at the edge of a ploughed field, where no traffic is around to disturb us, apart from the occasional person bumping past on a bicycle.
(Footnote: Dr Hu – or Ho, depending on which guidebook you read — was a Taoist healer who had risen to fame largely on the back of his being discovered by the British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, being visited by Michael Palin, and by featuring in the Lonely Planet China guidebook. He was known as “one of the three outstanding doctors of Lijiang” and died at the age of 97 in 2019.)
It takes about half an hour to ride back into the centre of Lijiang, and by then we have had enough cycling for one day, so we return the bikes to the hire shop, then walk down into the old city. Linda buys a few souvenirs from one of the stalls in the market square, then we stroll down the cobbled streets leading deep into the old town.
We have a snack of noodles in a tiny shop, where the stools are only 6 inches high, and while we eat, the two ladies who run the shop sit knitting and chatting. Outside the shop, across the street, in other words 2 metres away, on a perch jutting from beneath the eaves of a house, a falcon is tethered. He watches keenly as people move along the street, his sharp yellow eyes full of malice. And who can blame him, his place is in the sky, not tethered to a house.
CurseOfTheTraveller 