essBlog

Like China, but green.

Dali is about four hours north of Kunming and a popular stopover on the way to Leaping Tiger Gorge.  Kat and I left D in Kunming while he got his visa extended.  We had expected to regroup in Dali before heading to the gorge to take in the scenery.

Unfortunately, visa processes are not always painless, and Dom fell victim to some bureaucracy.  While we had been told a visa could be issued quickly and easily over two days in Kunming, the actual process ended up taking eleven.

So the gorge didn’t happen, but we did end up spending a lot more time in Dali, which wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

Dali is way up in the Cangshan mountains.  Its elevation is about a mile up, and the temperature fluctuates wildly in the winter.  By day, it was in the sixties and high seventies, by night we were at freezing.

The old town forms the center of the city.  It’s made up of a cluster of restored buildings surrounded by a wall, all dating back to the 1400s.  The aptly named “Foreigner Street” houses most of the knickknacks and tourist-friendly shopping, while there are a humbling array of bars and hostels once you start moving away from the middle of the old town.

By Foreigner Street, where the "nice ladies" operate.

The city itself is overrun with expatriated foreigners and backpackers.  Dali has a reputation of being the Jamaica of China, and it definitely drives that point home with sheer dreadlock volume.  It’s an extremely friendly place, but it harbors a significant network of unsavory drug connections.  We were offered hashish on the street our first day out of the hostel by a woman on the street.

We learned later that the women on the street were part of a large and violent drug cartel that operates through the city catering to tourists.  There were stories about people that were rumored to have been dealing with the cartels, usually terminating in, “And nobody saw him after that.”  Apparently the wrath of the government has also come down on Dali, and any time that conversation turned to the towns hippie-dippy reputation, locals got very nervous and started warning about undercover agents.

So don’t do drugs, kids, mmkay?

This didn’t particularly affect our stay in Dali, though.  Scenery and nature were the aim of our trip, not recreational drug use, and scenery was freely available in Dali.

Erhai Lake: A Pretty Good Lake

Our first day was spent hiking the considerable distance from our hostel to Erhai Lake.  In retrospect, it probably would have been better to bus our way there, but we could see the lake and wrongly assumed that it would be a good time to walk there.  It turns out that Dali slopes toward the lake, so even though you can see it, that doesn’t mean you’re anywhere close to the actual body of water.

Once we reached the lake, it was a nice walk.  There are paths around the shore stretching as far as you’re willing to walk.  You can also see the somewhat horrifying site of the farmers washing their crops in the lake before they sell them to the shop owners in town.  Perhaps you will see a Chinese child relieving himself into the lake some fifteen feet away.  ”Oh,” you’ll say, “I ate a ton of those vegetables at breakfaOHMYGOD!”  By the time we reached the lake it was already getting late, and we had to head back to avoid being stranded in the dark, so we perhaps didn’t spend as much time there as we would have liked.

The other main attractions in Dali are the temples and architecture.  The three pagodas are probably the most famous old structures.  They looked nice, but were too expensive, so we settled for staring at them from a distance from the gates.

Zhonghe temple is situated around half way up the mountains and is accessible by chairlift.  The whole way up we heard unfocused chanting from the area.  We never managed to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from, but safe money is that there’s a real, functioning monastery in the area.  Once you’re at the temple itself there’s not a whole lot to do, other than enjoy the view.  A monk in the main section of the temple beckoned us in, so we decided it was worth taking a look.  Once inside we had incense thrust into our hands and there was more beckoning.

In retrospect, I should have known something was up.  ”Complimentary” is not a word you hear thrown around all that often in Chinese.  When you do hear it, it generally means “you are already paying too much money for this.”  Sure enough, before our incense had even burned down, the “monk” was gesturing for us to sign a book filled with signatures and written requests for health, happiness, world peace, and whatever else stoned tourists pray for (it was all in English, so the Chinese who visited the temple must have known what was up).

The gist was that we were supposed to give him at least 100元 (around $15 US) for him to pray for us to receive whatever it was we wanted.  He also made it clear that we had consented to this implicitly by taking the incense we had been offered.

Now, I know in retrospect I should have said, “So long!” and gone along on my way, but it is surprisingly hard to turn down a man dressed as a monk giving you the puppy dog eyes while making the confused expression of a child who has just been told that Santa is not real, and by the way the cookies you left out for him last Christmas aren’t the kind your dad likes.  I think I gave the guy about 50元.

I hear they filmed "The Quiet Earth" here.

Our other major Dali excursion was Dali Geothermal Paradise.  The buildup to the trip was enormous.  We had to take one bus an hour or so away, then take a second bus to get to the hot springs.  I definitely wouldn’t have tried getting there without a Chinese-speaking guide, as the process was not at all straightforward.  We ended up walking to the main gates, which was not a small trek, and took us probably another hour just to get to the entrance.

Once we were in the park, we found out that we were definitely there in the off, off, OFF season.  The park was more or less abandoned, and I think we saw maybe three other people over the course of the day.

Luckily for us, nature has no idea whether people are on vacation or not, so the springs themselves were fantastic and totally unoccupied.  The park itself had at least a dozen springs enclosed in wooden shacks.  Unfortunately, we learned that the allure of a white lady in a swimsuit was enough to attract everybody in the park to our pool once they figured out where we were.  By the time things became a thinly veiled staring contest, it was time to head out.

Imagine three grown Asian men in their underwear staring directly at the camera and you sort of get the feeling.

Finding the way back to Dali was a rushed and mildly nerve-wracking experience.  You have to flag down the bus that takes you back to town.  This bus has no preordained stop, but we were told we would have the best luck waiting in front of “the hotel.”  We picked the first hotel we found with somebody outside of it, and thankfully it turned out to be the right one.  The crowd kept getting bigger though, and after we saw the third full bus fly by, we started getting nervous that maybe we were going to be sleeping in this hotel instead of using it as a busstop.

The bus stops running at 5 PM.  We finally caught one at around 5:01.

The bus was full of locals, and a little boy in the back was absolutely transfixed by me.  I tried to answer his questions as best I could, and his mom seemed to appreciate it.  Before she got off the bus she gave me a packet of some seeds we had seen the locals carrying in giant bags that probably had two or three kilos of the things in them.  They tasted a little strange, so I asked what they were.

“Oh,” she told us enthusiastically, “Cannabis seeds!”