And they called it Camelot.

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Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change
-Scorpions

Carl the brewer moved up to Dali from Thailand about a decade ago. In those days, the expressway from Kunming was a dream and the journey out to the little village took days from the provincial capital. He looked around at the shacky little place and saw a unique atmosphere where the local Bai minorities and a few Han settlers lived in a sort of separated reality. There were more westerners in the town than Chinese tourists. Ganga grew through the cracks in the streets, and the police were more interested in drinking beers with visitors than hassling them for documents. For Carl, the place was an unexpected and perfect mix of hip and rural. It seemed real and unspoilt by mass tourism and he decided to pull up his stakes down south and move to town. As tourism grew in the area, he got the idea to brew local beer to sell to tourists and open a proper watering hole. After travelling to The States to study craft microbrewing under a few Norcal masters, he returned to build his brewery in the Yunnan hills. There was absolutely no equipment suitable for his purposes available so he searched the east coast to find a manufacturing facility that was up to the task. With his tanks installed, and his paperwork processed, Carl started to crank out quality ales using clean Yunnan mountain water and German malt. His bar developed a following as the town began to blow up in that quintessential Chinese way; just a little too fast for most of the people on the ground, never fast enough for the men at the top.

We met Carl standing behind his bar trying to round up a pack of lads to move a few tons of malt from one storage to a new storage unit. His charisma was undeniable and the task seemed a natural fit for our will-work-for-beer mentality. As we sat in the brewery taking a break from the schlepping, pulling a few glasses of fresh, cloudy amber off the barrel, Carl told his story and the story of modern Dali. "When I moved here mate, this place was a three street village with pigs wanderin' around. You hardly ever saw a Chinese tourist and expats would come out here for weeks to hide from east coast cities and get high with the locals. Then the freeway went in and the bus tours discovered the place. Now look at it!" And look at it we did, with wide eyes. On any given summer day 50,000 tourists flood the streets of old Dali town toting Lonely Planet guides in Chinese and cameras the size of small children. They buy cowboy hats and fake pistols for the kids and take pictures of themselves giving the peace sign in front of, well, everything. For us, coming out of the wilds of the west, the oblivion was a pleasant relief. Nobody hassled us, and it was nice to be taken for granted after so many months of being the local spectacle every time we rolled into a town. We took a room by a nearby lake, drank jugs of Carl's stout, and stumbled around from street food stall to noodle cart. It felt great to watch the parade of tourists parade by from the recesses. It was like being transformed from the role of animal in the zoo to visitor.

The pace of growth in such places is off the scale of comprehension for most of us in the west. At home, we are no strangers to massive influxes of tourists and rapid development, but a thousand fold increase in the number of annual tourists along with an urban expansion rate of 1000%!o(MISSING)ver a decade represents the kind of numbers only possible here. It would be as if North Lake Tahoe transformed into a monstrosity the size of downtown Las Vegas over the course of a few years. Most (if not all) of "ancient" Dali is little more than a fascade of Skagway-like storefronts where hundreds of vendors peddle the "same chachka, different town" sort of trinkets that urban tourists seem to find resistably irresistable. We sipped cappuccinos (our irresistable trinket dou jour) and watched the masses file by in one long, boring stream. If you think American tourists all go to the same places and do the same things, you should check out the Chinese. A robot might have more deviant flaws. But this often works marvelously to our advantage. A few days before we had taken two days off the bike to run the famous high route through the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Thanks to a colossal landslide that wiped the (paved) low road into the Yangtze 300 meters below, the place was empty. We cruised the 30 kilometers of perfect trail-running and stayed at an empty guesthouse on the other end. They made us a lovely meal and we devoured it on the stone balcony, totally alone in one of the most touristy spots in Yunnan. Normally the gorge would be full of bus tours but the road conditions meant that people would have to walk a half a kilometer or so to get to the next taxi so that rules out 99% of potential visitors. We took the paved road back the next day and again saw little human activity until we reached the parking lot where the busses could make it to and turn around. Getting to see the gorge was a real highlight of the whole trip and having it all to ourselves made us a bit homesick for our own little backdoor wilderness. Soon enough.

On the flip side of the mass package tour movement that has the new Chinese middle class totally hooked is a rising scene of young backpacker bohemian types. Aside from the hundreds of youngsters (and a few oldies) riding mountain bikes slowly to Lhasa over the last few months, we have met a few educated young people who are trying to discover a more open way of thinking. Carl employs a few of these types in his bar and slowly introduces them to western music and conceptual thought. His attitude is caring and warm and while he claims to be merely a copycat of other brewers, his location is anything but a repeat. Carl is an innovator, an artist, and a pioneer and the young people who show up to work at the bar get far more than fiscal compensation. They get the chance to see how creativity can come to life in everyday decisions. It is a concept that is rarely covered in their upbringing and education. Somewhere in the midsts of memorization and repetition, few ever develop the idea to question and create. Sitting outside the bar one night we met a young Chinese radio DJ from Beijing who we will call John. He was dressed smartly and spoke good English. As we discussed music and censorship in China, Allison explained the names of key figures to a waitress who came to our table to listen. I looked across the table and grinned when I saw the name Kurt Cobain being scribbled on a bar napkin. John was off on a wild adventure of Keroakian enlightenment. For years he had been forced to limit his playlists to harmless pop tunes and nationalistic propaganda under the demands of government officials. It drove him crazy to restrict his favorite music from the public he served and after nine years, against the advice of his family and most of his friends, John quit his job. He immediatly ran off to a music festival in a rural province where he consumed a sizable dose of LSD. Two days later he walked into an airport to buy a ticket back to Beijing but the schedule just ran together in a "quite confusing and beautiful way". So he just bought a random ticket to Kunming and went there instead. When he arrived in the capital of Yunnan, he immediatly hopped on a bus for Dali and here he was, talking music with foreigners over a good beer, feeling the cool night air, a free man for the first time in his life.

Here in Kunming, we are repairing our bikes and resupplying our med kit while we have access to modern bike shops and hopitals. We have had a bit of help with this from a local shop keep named Hui who recieved a package for us from the US. After riding to Lhasa last year, Hui decided to leave his career in the tech industry and open a bike shop. His customers are a good mix of young and old who depend on him for quality advice and service. Walking home from dinner one night, he giggled with delight to see a man emerging from his store to make the ride home on his bike. "I sold him that bike" Hui said with pride. As he helped a few young mountain bikers adjust their forks the other day the voice of Kurt Cobain could be heard coming from the back of the shop; "Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be...." The recording was from the Unplugged in New York album, recorded shortly before Cobain swallowed the cold end of a twelve guage. I remembered that time in my own life; a young hick, riding mountain bikes, hanging out with older bohemians and foreigners, listening to the music of a generation of questions. It seemed similar and yet worlds away from the reality of those young riders standing there in loose spandex shorts and Lance Armstrong jerseys. I realized something then that I did not see when I was their age: When the world has been paved for you, there is little to do but go back to the dirt.

Kunming is a pretty nice city but the noise and congestion, along with the bitter attitudes of expats and long-termers, epitomize our greatest frustrations with these months in China. A lot of foreigners find their way here for one reason or the other and their stories tend to lean towards the negative aspects of the country. We are never very at home in metropolises and the thought that the Vietnam border is only five days away is comforting. We will get out before our attitude sours too much for comfort. Carl is not always positive about his position, but he now feels like he is an important part of the community and therefore is upping the anty. In the coming months, he will move his brewery here to the capital to be closer to a bottling facility. The taste for finery among the young educated classes in China is on the rise and his investment will probably pay off well. As we polished off our glasses and headed back out to hoof another 4 tonnes of malt, Carl said something that made me choke up a bit: "I always say that if I ever make my fortune here mate, I'm gonna cash out and head up to Northern California, buy me a piece of mountain land, and become one of those strong old men I met there. That place is fuckin paradise!" We'll drink to that.

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