Yunnan: South of the Clouds

We’re Yunnan fans (we once said it was one of those places we wanted to grab you by the lapels and rave about), so we constructed this shorter trip as an easy Private Departure addition to any of our China trips (or as a short, sweet, stand-alone getaway). We begin in Kunming, the City of Eternal Spring, and make the short flight northwest to the 19 peaks and 18 streams of Dali, a major entrepôt on the southern Silk Road. Now north to glorious Lijiang and up, passing and gazing into the dizzyingly deep Tiger Leaping Gorge along the way, to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau at Gyelthang (recently and somewhat cornily renamed Shangri-La). Gyelthang, a bright cultural and biological mosaic, offers the unique spectacle of viewing the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween, which flow down from the plateau, within fifty kilometers of each other. And after a couple of days visiting the Tibetan monasteries and markets of Gyelthang, we fly back to Kunming.