Advertisement
Published: July 31st 2009
Edit Blog Post
The arrival at Dali was great. The
Jade Emu guesthouse has a beautiful courtyard and very nice staff. The dorm is more a hotel room than a real dorm. There are three beds in the room, which all fit about 4 Chinese. The bathroom is also quite large and made out of marble. The first night, I also lucky to even have the whole room for myself! The only tiny negative thing of the guesthouse is that the atmosphere is not really open. I wasn’t the only one having that feeling. We thought the reason for it is that most of the people who come here are with at least one other person. And, what is also quite annoying is that it seems that they only have one CD. I mean, I love Manu Chao, but to hear the same songs over and over again (mixed with some songs of other artists, though) is a bit too much.
At the end of the arrival day, I strolled the old town of
Dali. There are many shops made for tourists, but the atmosphere is good after all. Especially the streets behind the main streets are very nice and some nice houses
can be found there. I bought some fried potatoes and bread on the street from a woman living with her children in one of the alleys. They were both very good!
The next day, I wanted to climb the mountain near Dali, but I didn’t want to do that on my own. Therefore, I asked around in the hostel and found someone who was already planning on going, so I went along with her. We took a cable car up the mountain. At the mountain ridge there were many clouds, and so it seemed we disappeared into nowhere when the
cable car went into the clouds.
Up
Cang Shan, the mountain, there were some nice steps to the Qingbi stream, which had some amazing views. Then, we started the 12 km walk towards a chairlift that could take us down to the city again. The path was very easy and the views of the lake, Erhai Hu were beautiful. What I didn’t like was the valley itself. Because the Chinese are building houses along the coast and actually in the whole valley, you only see the roofs of those houses. It seems that there are almost no fields left, so that’s
a shame. Also, the path was a bit boring and I would definitely not recommend the walk to people who have been climbing other mountains. For me, as it is the first mountain I climbed, it was okay as a start.
The walk ended at the
Zhongde Temple, which is a small temple, but the people there were very nice. There, we had a freshly cooked meal and we watched the whole cooking ritual, just to get some more impressions about how they cook the food. After the delicious meal, we decided to walk down the mountain instead of taking the chairlift. The beginning of the road was okay, but after a few hundred meters, the road almost disappeared and we walked down a horse trail (used for Chinese people who don’t want to walk up or down the mountain). Because it has been raining a lot in this region, the road was really
slippery. Of course, I slipped twice.... However, it was really fun to do, at least more adventurous than the road we took on the mountain itself. Seven hours later, we reached Dali again. After a shower and clean clothes, I went into the town again
to eat and to walk some more in the old town. I saw a sunset with beautiful colours (as on the photos). That night I had two roommates, so I did not have the hotel room for myself anymore
The following morning, I went with one of my roomies to have some breakfast in the old town. I had some - supposed to be - famous banana pancake, which I cannot find in the streets anyway. It was not quite as good as I had hoped for... So I guess banana pancakes are not a part of Dali anymore. Next, we went to a village nearby,
Xizhou, by minibus. The village was not as nice as we expected. We walked to the lake
Erhai Hu and we could not even come close, because it was some kind of swamp before the real thing started... We took a horse carriage, regular transportation in this area, back to the main road. There we got a bus back to Dali. Halfway the trip, we say a local market, so we stopped the bus. The people from the bus did not see a reason why we wanted to get out of the bus
and found us very weird. They actually did not want to stop in the first place... The market was very nice with only local products and clearly not meant for tourists. The food on the market was unfortunately already finished, so we ate something in a restaurant at the road.
That night, I had a
facial and a half body massage, which was really good! My skin feels really soft and obviously they tricked us in buying the product... Now I only hope that it will keep my skin that soft!
The last day in Dali, I didn’t do a thing. I only brought my trousers to the tailor, because they had to get shortened. The rest of the day, I did some planning and writing this blog. Concluding, I just had a very relaxing day, preparing for the sleeper bus I will be taking tonight...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.192s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0767s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb