Beginning this coming January 1, direct rail service between Kunming and Lijiang will be available, connecting Yunnan's capital and most populous city with its most popular tourist destination.

Direct rail access from Kunming to Lijiang not only offers a new and relatively hassle-free way to get to Lijiang's old town, it also provides increased access to other popular destinations including Shuhe, Yulong Snow Mountain, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Lugu Lake.

The new train line will operate twice daily, with the day train leaving for Kunming at 8:20 am and arriving at Lijiang East Station at 7:30 pm for a total of more than 11 and a half hours plus a faster night train that leaves Kunming at 10:00 pm and arrives just under nine hours later at 6:55 am.

Ticket prices for the train will range from 130 yuan to 614 yuan.

The glaciers of Yulong Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山), one of Lijiang's top tourist attractions and a major source of water for the region, are disappearing quickly due to global warming, according to information released by the Frigid and Arid Zone Environment and Engineering Institute of the China Academy of Sciences.

Between 1982 and 2002, Yulong Snow Mountain's largest glacier, Baishui Number One Glacier, receded 250 meters. The glacier and other glaciers on the mountain also became thinner and have been accumulating less snow, the institute said. The above photos compare the mountain several years ago (top) with how it appeared this past Sunday.

Yulong Snow Mountain is a mountain massif, or small mountain range, which is seated 25 kilometers north of Lijiang's old town and forms the southern side of Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the world's deepest gorges. It spans 13 kilometers from east to west and is home to 19 glaciers covering a total area of 11.6 square kilometers.

Yulong's glaciers are crucial to the surrounding area's ecology and they are also a major tourist draw for Lijiang, one of China's most popular travel destinations. The photos below compare how one of Yulong's peaks looked in November 2004 (top) and last Saturday.

After getting shut down by intense recent winds that were strong enough to rip a 100-year old tree out of the earth by its roots, Lijiang's Yulong Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山) reopened to visitors last Friday.

On February 8, the second day of Chinese New Year - a day which is traditionally spent visiting family and friends - Lijiang's Yulong Naxi Autonomous Prefecture was hit by rare intense windy weather that damaged more than 550 homes and affected 2,100 villagers, according to a Dushi Shibao report.

Elderly residents who had spent their entire lives in the area said that they had never witnessed winds as powerful as they experienced last week. The windstorm - which came just as Lijiang and surrounding areas were beginning to recover from a late winter storm - continued for four days before tapering off on February 12.

Images: clzg.cn

UK newspaper The Guardian is reporting that the controversial plan to dam Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) has been scrapped.

The sparing of the gorge and its 100,000 inhabitants – who would have been forced to relocate to much less hospitable terrain – may be the biggest win to date for mainland environmentalists. The victory may only be a pyrrhic one, as other portions of the Yangtze River's upper reaches, known in Yunnan as the Jinsha River (金沙江) are under consideration for hydropower projects.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is where a roughly 15-kilometer stretch of the Jinsha runs between 5,596-meter Yulong Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山) and 5,396-meter Haba Snow Mountain (哈巴雪山). The gorge features 2,000-meter cliffs leading above intense rapids that are not considered navigable.

The area has traditionally been home to more than 100,000 residents, most of whom are from the Naxi ethnic minority. Since opening to foreign tourists in 1993, the gorge has seen a steady increase in tourist visits, which has led to road improvements and construction of several guesthouses along the 'high road' above the river.

The decision to spare the gorge from being dammed and filled will likely benefit tourism to the area, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the Three Parallel Rivers Protected Areas. However it is unlikely to be the end of new hydropower projects, as it is thought that damming the Jinsha could prevent the flow of silt downstream to the Three Gorges Dam.

Silt is considered a threat to the navigability of the Yangtze, which is expected to be able to handle increasing levels of containerized sea-going barge traffic as far west as Chongqing in the coming years.

Some officials are also proponents of using the damming of the Jinsha to flush out the pollution that has accumulated in Kunming's Dianchi Lake, which is one of China's largest and most polluted freshwater lakes. China's second-largest hydropower project at Xiluodu began construction in November of last year.

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