Traveling Adventures

With my friend Gordon coming over from Thailand and Linda’s cousin Yao coming over from Guangzhou we decided to go travelling to the famous places in Yunan province. The four of us headed to Dali. The town itself is very much a tourist town. We walked one street for twenty minutes and all we found we’re nicknack shops. Well that and some beautiful caramel candies shaped like a phoenix. Those were rather cool looking although a little too sweet for my liking. Our hostel was very pretty with comfy beds, good coffee and over friendly dogs. We actually spent very little time in the town. Our first day we spent on a trek to the lake. We opted to walk through the fields to get there and ended up really enjoying it. We walked through tons of rice and corn fields and asked the farmers for directions. I enjoyed being able to see a real chinese country side. How else would I get to see women wearing rice hats and what appeared to be ghost buster backpacks spraying pesticide on their crops? We got a little tired and opted for a horse carriage trip to the lake. This turned out to be a highlight. We went to what appeared to be a fishing area in the middle of nowhere. Along the way we got to see Chinese farmers going about their daily lives. Somehow this was much more interesting than tourist sites. Gordon and I agreed that if it weren’t for our chinese speaking travelling partners we would have been to afraid to get on that horse buggy. As it was, sometimes sketchy things are the most interestings.

The next day we went up the local mountain. After taking the chairlift up we went for some chinese hiking. This involves walking on a flat stone path past beautiful scenery. In this case it was mountains peeking out of the clouds and fog. Throw in the odd waterfall and phoenix looking rock face that we saw and you get an idea of what chinese landscape art is depicting. We were going to go into some phoenix cave but the fact that rocks from a landslide blocked the entrance made us reconsider. There are some things that are in fact too sketchy to do. [Linda's sidenote: Gordon had wanted to go up despite the fact it was raining and the rocks were slippery and no way to save oneself if he were to slip. So telling him: "I don't want to explain your parents how stupid a way you died" worked in nipping that in the butt. Yao has claimed that was the best quote on this trip]

All in all I enjoyed Dali very much. Hey, maybe I’ll even get to writing the Lijiang post sometime soon.

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