On Tuesday, October 27th we had a quick breakfast of egg sandwiches at the hostel and then got on a bus at 8:00 am to head over to Lugu Lake (泸沽湖）. Lugu Lake is one of the last truly matriarchal societies in the world. The reason it has been so well preserved was because the society was unknown to the Chinese government up until 10 years ago when it was discovered. One of the women left the village and walked for 7 days until she reached Lijiang. She later moved to Beijing and reported to the world about her town.
Today Lugu Lake has a relatively developed tourist industry and is known as 女儿国 or "Daughter's Kingdom." They have 走昏, which means "Walking Marriages." This means that the women don't get married to one man for life. If they fall in love with a man, then he comes to her bedroom at night and leaves in the morning. This usually lasts for 5-10 years or so, after which they usually break up, and the woman starts seeing another man. All the men live with their mother's or sister's family, so the children's mothers and uncles raise the children. They don't live with their fathers.
So on Tuesday morning we
got on a very small bus with our tour guide. It wasn't a problem at first, but then we started driving very fast down dirt roads on the side of the mountain. You can see in the picture on the windy roads through the mountains. Every time we would drift off to sleep, we would be jolted awake by a huge bump in the road, upon which all of us would go flying out of our seats. Our bus had to go up and down 5 mountains for 9 hours before we arrived in Lugu Lake. Also our tour guide had a tendency to yell and sing into her microphone more loudly than anyone could bear. But the scenery was beautiful!
As soon as we arrived after our long bus ride, we got on cable cars (which was basically just a ski lift up the face of the mountain). At the top we had a beautiful view of the lake and mountains. As we arrived, we saw wild monkeys in the trees jumping around. There was a Buddhist temple at the top and also a cave with special spring water that supposedly will make you have twins.
Afterward, we went to our tour guides home. I guess this was part of our travel package, but it certainly was wonderful hospitality. Her family had 39 people! We all sat and ate the delicious and over-abundant food. Also, this society has a very strict cultural tradition that the men and women drink different alcohol. So the men's alcohol was basically rubbing alcohol. We're talking Everclear/Moonshine alcohol here. The woman's alcohol was basically tea with a little wine in it. And of course the family was toasting us the entire time…
After we ate dinner, we went to the town square where they have traditional dancing. After watching the dancing, we all got to dress up in traditional clothing and they taught us their traditional dance, which was basically dancing in a circle. Then we had a singing contest with the local people where they would sing 2 lines from a song, and then we would sing 2 lines from a song. I think we lost.
Afterward, we sang songs on the bus until w
e got back to our hotel. We were excited because we could actually see the stars and the moon, as opposed to in Nanjing where that will always be impossible. So we walked to the lake and lay by the lakeside stargazing. We saw about 6 shooting stars! It was amazing. It was also freezing outside and our hotel rooms didn't have any heat. We also didn't have any hot water so it was a cold experience!
The next morning was Wednesday and we got up at 7:00 am to walk along the lake. Then we got in rowboats and rowed across the lake to an island. The picture above is us on the rowboat going across the lake. Since this society was isolated, I really don't know how Tibetan Buddhism got there, but it must have been the religion from thousands of years ago. Anyway, on the island there were a couple beautiful Tibetan Buddhist temples. After looking at the art and other artifacts i
n the temples, we took the boat back to shore. Before we headed back to Lijiang, we stopped at an elementary school. We found a classroom that didn't have a teacher in it (I'm not sure why... teacher shortage maybe?) and talked with the students there about their lives and their family.
We were all dreading the 9-hour bus ride back to Lijiang, so we decided to play Mafia, which is a game with a Killer, a Policeman, and townspeople. We probably played that game for at least 6 hours. It was pretty fun because you get to use your imagination. We had a zombie apocalypse, we were dolphins in the sea, we were pirates, and we had a Mean Girls theme… pretty much everything you can imagine. It was pretty hilarious—it's a psychological game. We also played a Japanese clapping game. In the middle of the trip we stopped at a restaurant and while we were eating lunch they slaughtered a pig right outside and we could hear it squealing for like 10 minutes. We all agreed that it was strange and it even made some people sick! Finally we arrived back at Lijiang on Wednesday evening.
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