{"id":37515,"date":"2025-12-10T22:42:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=37515"},"modified":"2026-03-10T14:34:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T06:34:02","slug":"day-06-shangri-la-napa-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2025\/12\/10\/day-06-shangri-la-napa-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 06 @ Shangri-La – Napa Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had just two activities for Day 06 in Shangri-La county today: visiting Napa Lake<\/strong> (also known as Napahai Nature Reserve) in the morning, and Pudacuo National Park in the afternoon. Napa Lake is a vast grassland surrounded by mountains. The grasslands though were mostly dried up in winter and looked drab \u2014 I’ve no doubt that it looks much better in spring and summer. But the most popular activity for tourists like us visiting Napa Lake is horseback riding. The costs of the horseback riding experience weren’t included in our tour package and were left as an optional experience, but since we were here, we went for it. The price per person was 280 RMB for the classic route, but our guide bargained it down to 200 RMB. Guests in the experience also have the option of dressing up in traditional Tibetan clothes, though only the girls in the family went for it. The boys \u2014 basically myself and Peter \u2014 opted to keep it simple and made do with cowboy hats.<\/p>\n

So, about the experience:<\/p>\n

The horses are all tame and trained to listen to the horsemasters’ instructions \u2014 most of the time at least.<\/p>\n

Horse riding isn’t the most comfortable experience for those of us not used to it, but you’d get used to it. One thing though: you’re required to grip the saddle handle at all times, which means if you’re fidgety about smartphone use, consider wearing some kind of harness or sling for your phone if you want to take pictures while on horseback. Otherwise, if your phone slips, it lands on the ground \u2014 which, depending on the season, could be muddy. And even if not, there’s horse and cattle dung everywhere!<\/p>\n

You might not get to ride together as a family. The horsemasters try to group horses that work well together, and I suspect the lead horse in each group is likely the one who knows the route very well. Apparently my horse didn’t get along well with the other three that the rest of the family was riding on, so my horse trailed along a bit behind and I could not join in for a family photo while all of us were on our horses.<\/p>\n

I also recommend having the family photographer be the one who mounts first and be at the front. I didn’t think about that and ended up mostly taking pictures of everyone’s behind. LOL.<\/p>\n

Pictures!<\/p>\n

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Next post: Pudacuo National Park!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had just two activities for Day 06 in Shangri-La county today: visiting Napa Lake (also known as Napahai Nature Reserve) in the morning, and Pudacuo National Park in the afternoon. Napa Lake is a vast grassland surrounded by mountains.<\/p>\n

Read More Day 06 @ Shangri-La – Napa Lake<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[689],"class_list":["post-37515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-traveling","tag-yunnan-western-sichuan-2025","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/blog-2025-yunnan-day-06-20251210_110434.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37515"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38105,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37515\/revisions\/38105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}