Dali Dali Dali

A longer, and smellier, than expected bus ride brought us to Dali, not without interesting sights of the wheat thrashing season and the ingenuity of the farmers who in numerous spots along the way had emptied piles of wheat stalks onto the road so that buses and trucks when driving over them would thrash it up so that it can be swept up and burned (to make compost?). This process got a little ambitious at one point however, and caused a traffic jam as the pile was too big for a bus to drive over and some rapid clearing and flattening had to take place before we could continue...


Dali is similar to Lijiang, but is home to the Bai people, (and Lijiang the Naxi people), and has a more relaxed, scruffier 'boho'-type feel, (in part due to the colourful embroidered tie-dye fabrics made by the Bai ladies that are on sale everywhere), with more backpackers around. It's very pretty and is wedged between green mountains and a long ear-shaped (apparently, as its so named?) lake. It's a relief being back in 'tourist town' in a way, as finding a room and choosing a meal become taken for granted simplicities again. We've spent our time here since we arrived on Monday afternoon relaxing, exploring the town and walking on the old wall which surrounds the town in places.

The streets are lined with colourful craft/ souvenir stalls, flute stalls infecting the air with their eerie flute music all day long, a few melville or long street-like shops, restuarants all playing their own tourist-attracting music, and interesting fresh produce in buckets in the entrances of shop stalls, from which you choose your meal...veggies of all sorts, and fish, crabs, crayfish all alive and swimming...

Tomorrow we catch a bus to Kunming where we'll have 2 nights before high-flying it in Hong Kong...better get ourselves some surgical face masks!