Further Wanderings

The next stop on the list was Dali, west of Kunming. Dali, sitting between the Cangshan mountains and Lake Erhai (China’s sixth largest) was one of the original Chinese backpacker towns, and was supposed to have a charming old town.

Our arrival didn’t bode well. We alighted from the train in Xiaguan, 30km away from Dali at the south end of the lake. Following the instructions from the hostel we’d booked at we took a bus from there to old Dali. Unfortunately the stop we were looking for never appeared. At the end of the line we disembarked and saw a queue of hundreds waiting for the return bus back to Xiaguan. We walked the whole 1km of the main street, then 2km further along the Yunnan-Tibet highway, then 2km back. All this time we were asking directions of people, getting inconclusive answers and looking for the name of the bus stop we should have got off at, which was no more helpful. As dark drew in we gave up and found a room at another place not far from the old town.

Deep fried drumsticks for sale at Dali’s San Yue Jie festival
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One thing that’s really struck me about train travel in China is how friendly everyone is. People who’ve never met before in their lives are instantly chatting away like old friends if they’re sitting next to one another. Our trip from Guilin to Kunming was no exception to this.

We had hard sleeper beds, which means they’re stacked three high, with a pair of stacks making a little cubby-hole off the aisle of the train. To our surprise, our cubby-mates all (save one) spoke good English. There were two young men from Guilin on their way to a public speaking competition (in English), and a mother and daughter from Kunming on their way home from a holiday together (the mother was the one who didn’t really speak English, though we and she did pretty well with sign language and her daughter translated when necessary. And she also spoke a tiny bit of Dai. The Dai are an ethnic minority in China who are descended from Thais. Their language is very similar, so everyone was very entertained when I joined right in as mom was counting from 1 to 10 in Dai.)

We spent the afternoon and evening chatting and sharing the variety of snacks we’d brought along (we had oranges and sunflower seeds, they had pomelos and an odd fruit that was very like a slightly sweet, orange avocado.) We’d brought our typical train dinner of instant noodles, but as it turned out we didn’t really need them. Sarah had mentioned that she was fond of mogu (mushrooms.) When Yiqun and her mother returned from dinner, they surprised us with a container full of yummy mogu and rice!

The famous Luohan of Kunming’s Bamboo Temple
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Back in Sanjiang we arrived at the bus station in late morning. Sanjiang had two bus stations with a river and a bridge in between them. It took us quite a bit of work to realize that the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Our bus trip took us through more lovely countryside, much of it quite dry, but some parts filled with the gorgeous yellow rapeseed fields that we'd already seen up close in Xuanzhou. It turned out that our direct bus ... [Continue reading this entry]

Boarding our train in Guangzhou provided further confirmation of something that we'd started to notice already: when travelling by train in China with big luggage (Sarah and I had a 12kg and 16kg packs respectively) especially if yours is the ... [Continue reading this entry]

From Meizhou way up in Guangdong's northeast corner we were headed down to Guangzhou, the capital of the province. It was a seven hour train trip, with us arriving in the early evening. Most of the trip took ... [Continue reading this entry]

Before leaving Xiamen we grabbed breakfast from one of the ubiquitous breakfast pastry carts that seemed to occupy a spot on every second block everywhere in Xiamen. We ended up with (not entirely surprisingly really) two big sweet white-bread ... [Continue reading this entry]

Arriving in Xiamen by ferry on a Friday morning we were immediately faced with a problem: we had no idea where we were. The ferry terminal was more modern and full of services than the ones in Tianjin or ... [Continue reading this entry]

As usual, our first stop on arriving in the northern port city of Keelung was the visitor information centre. Surprisingly, no one there really spoke English, but they made up for it by having a staff of about 8, ... [Continue reading this entry]