There wasn’t anything to keep me in Shangri-la but I had heard about a
little village where they made black pottery and which had some nice old houses. Along the road there are
retail outlets selling this pottery to passers-by and I saw at least one
workshop on the road.
I had gone to the bus station in Shangri-la t
o see if I could find a local minibus to jump onto with the villagers. The men hanging about the bus station looking for business laughed at me when I told them what I wanted. “Nobody wants to go to Nixi village” they said and “Everyone has their own car”.
The only option left open to me was to hire a car and driver for myself for the day. I wanted to avoid this as it cost £20 but I had no choice if I wanted to go to Nixi. I found myself a Nixi villager amongst the throng and we set off.
After 20 minutes we turned off the main road and headed steeply down to the village and arrived at the driver’s house where I declined lunch and he set me off in the right direction to see some old houses. I was a bit dubious when he said the houses were indeed very old “Some are 60 years old” he boasted. This is not exactly old in my book but he promised me I would like them.
I didn’t have to walk for long before taking myself back to Medieval England – at least what I thought it might have looked like. The animals lived on the ground floor, the family on the first floor and the top floor was for the storage of food. What fantastic houses and hard to believe they are not really very old.
I poked around these houses until I found a villager who was keen to show me inside theirs. It was so dark when I first went in but soon my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could see the stove in the middle of the room and the water butt and buckets.
All through the village were small kilns and several wonderful shrines with prayer flags with the backdrop of a green valley and blue clouds. There is surely no more lovely village in China.