Shangri-La: really?

Those of you who have read James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon (we're expecting that's no-one) will know all about Shangri-La. For those of you who haven't, Shangri-la has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.
Arriving in the Chinese town of Shangri-la (previously called Zhongdian, until the Chinese renamed it in 2001 claiming it was the place from the novel), we found the reality to be somewhat different. The once beautiful old town was tragically destroyed in a fire in January, leaving what felt not too far from a war zone.

Looking for somewhere for dinner, we found that many of the recommended restaurants had been destroyed in the fire, but found a nice homely-feeling restaurant just off the square. Whilst the food was good, our dinner was temporarily interrupted by an altercation (about 3 metres outside the window) which started as a bit of shouting and pushing between two 4x4 drivers and culminated in one of them pulling out a huge knife! Thankfully there were (just) enough other people around to restrain the man and stop the knife being used in anger.

And having returned to our hostel (and enjoyed a very nice ginger, lemon & honey tea), we suffered a sleepless night, as our bodies struggled to adjust to the altitude (3200m). Not a great introduction to paradise.

After a day of relaxation to let our bodies recover (and shelter from the persistent rain), we did manage to enjoy a day's (relatively gentle) cycling around the area...

...visiting the biggest and most important monastery in south west China:

...and meeting a somewhat scary looking man on a moped who flagged us down in the middle of nowhere - who turned out to be the most excited yet about seeing (and most importantly getting some photos with) some westerners (a pleasure we've regularly had over the last month):

 

So whilst we wouldn't necessarily recommend including a trip to 'paradise' in your travels in the near future, we are glad to have spent some of our pennies helping a community that must be in need of it.