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June 9th 2006

Published: July 7th 2006

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Omer

Kunming's train station

I feel like a chinese tourist

Well last time i wrote everyone I was in dali, a really cool old city.
So I actually did stay there a few days, and it was very nice.
In dali I met Oz and Yael an israeli couple we were with in yangshou and shlomi again. And also 3 israeli girls that we met in kunming shelly, tom and revital.
We took a bicycle and did a tour around the lake outside the city, again we passed through villages and it was very nice.
We went out at night to a chinese pub and strangely the chinese people decide to buy you all the alcohol you want, so we got completely drunk, danced a lot and had a lot of fun with the chinese people.
The next day me yaniv and tom climbed to a monstary that has a view of the entire old city and the lake, the climbing was pretty hard 1 hour of steep climb. When we got to the top we met another israeli couple, anat and dany, it's the couple that did the track with us in pingan. And ofcourse just as we got to the top it started rainning, heavily, so we had to

Budhist Temple in Kunming

Our first budhist temple

take the chairlift down and buy some cheap chinese rain coat that lasted exactly 30 minutes.
We also went to take photos of the 3 pagodas in dali, a very famous place, but we didn't enter because it was very expensive, the chinese ask for a lot of money for every attraction, it's incredible.
After Dali we headed to lijiang, a small city that also has an old part and is supposed to be beautifull. Well we had very bad luck with the weather, it was rainning nonstop for 3 days, so we could do nothing. We went out to the old city every night, it's still very beautifull full of chinese red lamps and small stone streets(reminds you a bit of the old city of jerusalem), but it was pretty dissapointing overall. Also because of the weather we couldn't go out to a trek we wanted to, the most famous one in china: The tiger leaping gorge.
We decided to head for zhongdian, a city already very close to tibet and full of tibetian, which is already 3200meters tall, and if the weather gets better to go out to the track from there.
So the next day the weather

Bicycles Again

Our group getting lost again, this time in dali

got better, and we went a big group of israelis to the track, 8 people.
The track was very beautifull, although it is full of graffiti advertising the guesthouses along the way. it was also weird for me to sleep in a guesthouse when you are on a track.
Still the view was amazing, and we had a great time since we were a big group, I will post the photos for this update very soon.
The track was pretty easy and only 2 days long, when the first day is only 2 hours. From the end of the track we decided to go through a small village called baishutai, which was supposed to have some very nice limestone(even gir) terraces. The limestones were nice but not special and everyone were already very tired so we decided to go back to zhongdian with the bus. The bus ride was amazing, with wonderfull views and old remote villages all around, but it was also a very hard drive on a really bumpy road, and a few people got really sick. I guess it started my awful bus drives in china because I had a few since then 😉.
We stayed in

The lake in Dali

The lake we went to with the bicycles.

zhongdian a day to rest and do nothing. And then the next day we splitted, the girls went to dali and me yaniv and the 2 israeli couples decided to go to deqin, a town right on the tibetian border, where you can go and do a lot of tracks from.

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