Dali

---

Saturday July 22nd

Needless to say I woke up late on Saturday. We were planning to put our stuff in the dutch's room as we were leaving on a sleeper bus at 22:00 so we had to checkout by 14:00 from our room (wierd checkout time). We woke up too late for breakfast at the hotel so I went to City Cafe to have a chocolate pancake that was delicious. I went back to the hotel and slowly packed. I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do for the day. The brits went to the pagodas the day before and now they wanted to go to the park which is supposed to be nice on the weekend. I decided I'd go with them but I didn't say it too clearly and they still thought I was going to the pagodas. Joe on the other hand had decided to go with us to Dali so he went to the bus station to try to get on the sleeper bus with us. When he came back he said he had not managed to find a place on the sleeper but had taken a place on the express bus that left at 2:30. I suggested he goes to Guesthouse Number 3 as Louis and Maude from Yangshuo had told me it was an awesome place and tell the management 4 more people would be coming the day after which he agreed to. After that I went to the hotel "business center" to look at my emails with all my backpacks as I knew Myriam was already there. I looked at my emails for a while and at some point Myriam left and said bye. I thought she was just going to her room or something and I figured I'd go put my stuff there after I was done with my prepaid time.

However when I was finished I went to put my stuff in her room but I couldn't find her or the brits anywhere. I waited around in the lobby for a while but it seemed there had been a communication breakdown somewhere and they had taken off to the park without me. After waiting for a long time I figured I'd go to the pagodas anyway. I walked to the West Pagodas and walked around the muslim district. The pagodas are not that impressive but I liked walking around Kunming. It has a very laid back atmosphere absent from other big chinese cities. Also the temperature is perfect (it is at nearly 2000m elevation so it is not as hot as the rest of china in the summer). I came back to the hotel by 5, bought a notebook and organized all the contact emails I had obtained from the trip in a single notebook instead of scrap of paper in the park in front of the hostel.

The brits and the dutch passed by at some point. They were all sorry about what happened but it is sort of my fault also as I didn't really tell them that I'd go with them and just assumed that I'd see them after I was done with the internet. We went to the teahouse next to the hotel and talked for about 2 hours. We exchanged emails with the dutch and said goodbye as they were going to take a plane to Lhasa in the following day and wouldn't follow us to Dali.

We took a taxi to the bus station. This is a nice thing about travelling in a group, you can get a cab and split the cost whereas if you're alone (and on a tight budget) you have to take public transport more often as taxis can become expensive in the long run. This was my first sleeper bus so I didn't quite know what to expect. It turns out it is not too bad. Just imagine a normal bus and put 3 beds on the left side, a very narrow alley and a bed on the right side. It is pretty small as they are made for chinese and I am a bit more voluminous than the average chinese but they're not that bad, you just have to get used to foetus position or put your feet in someone's face. As Rob, Sam and Pete have known each other for a long time we decided that they would have the chance to be cozy on left side while I'd be in the lone bed on the right side. The beds are small even for the locals so let's just say it was a bit tight and that the brits were closer to each other than they have ever been. The bus left a bit late and we all fell asleep really fast, just after Rob said that he didn't want to wake up in the "spoon position" with Sam and Pete.

Sunday July 23rd

The night was surprisingly comfortable and we all slept well until we arrived at 6:30AM. From what I could see the british didn't end up spooning each other but they seemed to love being close because they didn't want to get up to get a cab. At some point the bus driver came in and told us to get off (we were the only one remaining) so we did and we started bargaining for a taxi. Getting to Dali can be a bit confusing. There is Xiaguan (Dali New City) which is where we were dropped but has absolutely no interest and Dali Old City which is 20 minutes by car away. The problem is that they just tell you the bus goes to Dali when it fact it goes to Xiaguan (Dali New City) so if you don't know in advance that even if they tell you that you'll be dropped in Dali you won't really be in Dali you are sort of confused when you get out of the bus. This is amplified by the fact that you arrive at 6:30AM, a bad time for thinking if there ever was one.

Anyway we are a bunch of hardy traveller so we knew all that stuff and managed to get a cab for 40RMB to the "real" Dali. After some confusion I managed to tell the driver to drop us close to the very originally named Guesthouse number 3. Joe was already there and had booked a dorm for us like we had placed so we just knocked, entered and crashed in the beds for a few hours before even checking-in. After we woke up we slowly checked-in, showered and got ready to go out. By the time we were ready it was noon. Joe introduced us to Steve, an american he had met the day before and who had been living in Xian teaching english. Turns out that Steve is a chemistry graduate who, like me, took time off to see the world before graduate school.

We went at some nice looking restaurant that served western and chinese food. I got some italian pizza which was a great breakfast. The place was probably the most disorganized restaurant I've ever seen and it took us 2 hours to eat, most of the time was spent waiting on the food. The waitress was nice enough but serving more than 2 people at a time was more than she could handle. Like Sam's orance juice was one of the last thing that she brought even though she had brought Rob's orange juice early. She just had forgotten about Sam's and had to be reminded twice before she brought it. We gave some bad publicity to the restaurant as we left and 2 girls which were about to sit down turned around and left after we told them how much time it took. The food was good however so I hope this place will figure out how to solve their organization problems.

We walked around the city a little bit and we split because we all wanted to buy different things and said we'd meet at the hostel to go to the pagodas. I was really unimpressed by Dali. Everything seems fakes, there are westerners and westerners cafe everywhere. Maybe it would be a place I'd enjoy after trekking for a week in the mountain but it was a bit too much like Yangshuo for me to enjoy. I decided I'd leave the day after to Lijiang and maybe even not spend the night in Lijiang to head directly to Qiatou to do the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek. After about 30 minutes we all met up at the hostel. The 3 Pagodas are about 3 kilometers away from the Old City so we had decided to walk there. However we were soo enough harassed by horse-drawn carriage driver who wanted to take us for a ride. We said no at first but changed our mind when he said it was only 1RMB per person and we saw that the walk was on a sort of boulevard which is not the most interesting place to walk. We got on and quickly made it to the pagodas along a very dusty and unimpressive looking road. I had heard that the pagodas were not that impressive and we not worth the huge entrance fee (120RMB) but we realized that the entrance fee was only 60RMB if you had a student card (they don't even look at the card, Joe had a 2 year expired ISIC and they accepted it) so we decided to go in.

The place is quite big and looks decently nice. It is pretty touristy so getting a decent shot without catching half a dozen chinese posing can be difficult. The 3 Pagodas were built originally in the 9th Century and are some of the oldest Yunnanese building left standing. They are a short walk from the entrance and after the Pagodas there is a large multi-pavillon chinese temple that goes up on the mountainside. Whereas the Pagodas at least looked real, the temple looks like something that has been fabricated a few years ago. Some of it might be old but it is obvious that this temple, like most of China's cultural heritage, was severely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and was quickly built up in the 80s and 90s to attract tourists. The statues are very shiny and look like they were made out of plastic. Even the souvenir stalls have been built in the same style as the temples so that you generally can't tell if there would actually be a building there in a normal temple and that it is used in this one as a souvenir stall or that such a building would never be built in a normal temple but that the contractors didn't care and they just built souvenir stalls randomly around the place. The view with the temple, the mountain and the mist is nice enough but like everything else in Dali everything just seems fake and artificial. Rob summed it up pretty nicely: "I feel ripped off. This place will be awesome in 2000 years but right now it's nothing impressive".

We tried to find the pond where we heard you could take cool pictures of thepagodas reflecting in the lake but couldn't find them which led us to hypothesized that this whole cool pictures in the lake thing was invented by a tourist agency somewhere and that the pond never actually existed.

We left the site and went back to Dali on another horse-carriage (after negotiating for 1RMB each because the driver wanted 3 at first, he caved in when we went to talk to other drivers). People like Steve and Joe sometimes make me feel maybe teaching english in China would be an interesting experience. After less than a year they can talk with the local fairly well (Steve even mentionned that after 2 years he had reached a level where he could have advanced philosophical conversation about the meaning of death with Tibetan nomads). The downside is that you spend your whole year getting to know one culture more deeply but you don't see anything of the rest of the world which would be a shame. I guess if I was in business it would be useful to know chinese for my career but as a future scientist it is quite useless, unless you want to communicate with that chinese post-doc from mainland China that doesn't talk with anyone else in the lab because he doesn't really speaks english and works 80 hours a week (I'm not saying all chinese are like this, but I've seen a few in the places I've worked!). We decided to go to a Korean Restaurant but before we got there we heard some music coming from a side street and decided to go have a look. There were a few old men playing classical chinese music. It was fairly interesting but it lacks energy, even some musicians appeared to be falling asleep. I had that typical korean food which I forgot the name which consist of rice, egg, meat and vegetables with hot sauce. Good stuff.

Sam was planning to play golf for the night. Not the boring sport that they play on television on Sunday afternoon but the drinking game. Basically there is a list of drink which you have to drink in certain amount of shots to be on par. If you drink it in smaller number of shots you get below par and if it takes you more you get above par. I decided not to join them as I didn't feel like drinking like a hole again and this whole thing would cost quite a lot of money because some of the drinks can be pretty expansive. It sucks but I have a budget for this trip and if I spend it all drinking in the first few months I'll have to come back earlier than a year.

I still followed the crew for a while. We went to Cafe de Jack which has a cool ambience and ended up in Bird's Bar which is according to the Lonely Planet the favorite expat hangout spot. It is a nice place with a pool table and a local chinese man completely destroyed me. Joe got sick midway in the drinking game and I think Rob won it. I left around 1AM as I was planning to go to Lijiang in the next morning. The britishs came in the dorm room at 4:30AM making a lot of noise since Rob had decided to start wrestling with Pete. I started talking with them and Rob told me: "You won't be able to go to Lijiang tomorrow Victor, we'll wrestle you to the ground tomorrow morning when you leave". Sam mirrored my skepticism when he replied: "If Victor wants to leave now we'll f*cking get him, if he waits for about 10 minutes we'll all be sleeping and he'll be safe" to which Rob replied that he was gonna wait and get me.

When I got up at 9AM the next morning I asked Rob if he was about to wrestle me. I only got a grunt in answer. The way was free for me to get out of Dali to get into another city manufactured for tourists: Lijiang.

---

Photos

Temple behind the Pagodas
The heavily restorated temple with fully authentic fiberglass Buddah statues

Pagodas
The 3 Pagodas. They were built in the 9th century so at least we did see some historic building.

Pagodas and lake
Cool view.

Dali Old City Gate
From outside the city

Music show
Found a little chinese classical music show going on in Dali. Some chinese girl ended up posing in my picture.

Comments

[SilviaZho]

I just finished my 7-day trip in Yunnan and remembered this blog. I did read this but it was too different from what I saw. It looks very peaceful in your picture. But in my eyes, Dali looks like a huge plaza, noisy and too many people. Terrible~~ But Lijiang and Shangrila are really beautiful. And I also went to Deqin, moved by the gigantic jokul. It's holy.