Our hosts as the Maple Leaf Inn helped us arrange two side trips during our stay in Lijiang. When we perused the large promotional posters hanging in the front entry hall, Elise saw that horseback riding was an option and wouldn’t take no for an answer.We were picked up in a small van and driven about an hour away to the horse stables. We were delayed briefly when we tried to drive through a small rural town which was momentarily experiencing a three-vehicle traffic jam consisting of a large coach bus full of Chinese tourists, a horse-drawn cart full of hay, and a small farm truck. Pretty sure the tour bus was mostly to blame.
We finally arrived at the stables where a woman was selling hats to would-be riders to guard against the sun. Since I had allowed myself to get burned on the back of my neck during our day in the market in Dali, my wife suggested I buy a hat. It was the most ridiculous cowboy-esque looking hat I have ever seen. It looked like it was made from the pressed hairs from a coconut shell. It was hemmed all along the brim, except –for reasons I will never know- along the back where the fibrous material continued until it just kind of petered out. It made the hat look like it had tail feathers. Combined with my cheap sunglasses and the indigo blue batik kerchief around my neck that I’d bought on my way out of Lijiang that morning, I was rocking quite the look.
It was just the four of us in our group and apparently we weren’t going to be doing any trotting or cantering on this particular day because our guide was leading us on foot. His skin had tanned to a deep brown and his hair was shaved short except for the little floppy mohawk he was sporting. Despite the warm weather, he wore a heavy camouflage jacket.
Every so often during our late-morning ride, our horseless guide would sing out a few lines from a Mandarin-language song. At first I thought he was just an overly jolly guy happy to spending his days in the great outdoors, but then I realized that his vocal cords may have been loosened by whatever it was he kept sipping from that flask he regularly pulled from his breast pocket.
As on every guided tour in China, we made a stop part way though our ride. The stop served two purposes. One, there was a lady making a living selling horse feed to the tourists, which we bought so the girls could feed the horses. Second, it allowed our guide who had been walking all this way to have a little something to drink. Apparently, beer was part of the compensation package that the tour operators offered the guides, because off to one side under the shade of a tree was a case of Tsingtao beer. Our guide helped himself and in the course of our ten-minutes break, he managed to polish one off. Later at lunch, he had a couple more. And in between them all, he just kept taking swigs from that flask. His singing got louder and more robust as we moved into the earlier afternoon. By now our ride had taken us from the meadows of the Quinhai-Tibetan Plateau and we were in the Hengduan Mountains. We were being lead through the pine-forested mountains of Yunnan province by a drunk guide in a camouflage jacket with a bad mohawk.
He kept turning back toward us excited to be able to use his English which consisted of “hello” and “Let’s go!” If I had a dollar for every time he turned around and gave me an enthusiastic –albeit slightly sloppy- “Let’s go!” I probably good have paid for dinner that night.
Despite the sporadic, off-pitch serenade, our horseback ride was extraordinary with amazing views of the mountain, valleys, and surrounding meadows.
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