Kunming & Dali
Four days in Kunming is beyond plenty. I arrived Saturday morning, which was probably not the smartest thing since my main business was visa acquisition. Kunming is the most Westernized of any Chinese city I’ve been to. There are a lot of western-style cafes near the university, and a big modern shopping district. The city’s layout is good for walking, with a big park smack in the middle. A whole street of Hui food stalls was one of the cooler ethnic influences.
I ordered up express service on the Lao visa because it was cheaper and quite frankly more appealing, to leave sooner rather than later. I’ve met a lot of travellers headed up to Dali, a day or two ahead or behind me.
Some food items have become staples. Ginger tea is prime among them, as is Yunnan coffee. You guys know I’m a tea drinker and there is some excellent tea in Yunnan, but you pay through the teeth for it. So I’ve mainly switched to Yunnan coffee, which is very rich with rounded dark chocolate notes and incredible smoothness. The Hump (the flophouse hostel) makes a mean Kashmiri chai, even better than the Kashmiris down on Gerrard St East do. An expat spot called Wei’s Pizzeria has won a lot of my business for its low prices and high quality food, both Western and Chinese. I’m a big fan of their macaroni al forno, but I must admit that my quest for a decent cheesecake in Asia continues. I also greatly enjoyed their supply of Tsingtao Dark, probably the best beer in China.
To Dali
The train to Dali was the oldest I’ve been on in China. It was much more crowded than any of the others, and smelled strongly of the coal fire used to power the engine (even though I was six cars back!). At first, the conditions on board weren’t too bad. City Chinese travel about as light as Westerners. It was only when we stopped at some smaller towns along the way that things really got messy. Rural Chinese carry all kinds of ridiculous things with them, and in great quantity. I’ve seen gigantic plastic bathtubs and sheep’s carcasses. And while there was no such exotica on the train, there were piles of boxes and bags everywhere. One woman was hauling a sextuplets’ supply of diapers. Did I mention that diapers are uncommon in China? Toddlers have slits in the backs of their pants and they just squat down whenever the needs strikes – anytime, anywhere. They don’t have pooper-scooper laws in China.
The sun shone brilliantly on the Yunnan countryside. When we weren’t in a tunnel, we were treated to Bai (a local minority) houses with corncob rooftops. That is to say, they were drying the corn harvest on every available surface. The houses are two-storey compounds, not unlike what you see in rural Central Asia. High walls surround an inner courtyard with one or two fruit trees. On the sides are stables and storage areas. The back wall has the residence. More than just occasionally, the outside walls are lined with various crops, some of the illegal, smokeable variety.
The train arrives in Dali City, aka New Dali. Nobody goes there. Often though, when getting off trains, the backpackers and Chinese head in different directions. Not so here. I was amazed to see the touts outside the train station totally ignoring us laowai (foreigners) and hassled the Chinese instead. Not only is this sweet justice, but economically this makes sense. Any touristy place I’ve been, even in Yangshuo, domestic tourists have far outnumbered foreigners. This is why we get all the neat little guesthouses – they are not equipped to handle the needs of massive Chinese tour groups, who must stay in monolithic white tile hotels in drab parts of town. Further, though the touts usually home in on foreigners, it’s the Chinese who come ready to spend money. I think perhaps they bargain better, but most backpackers are pretty good at it, since we almost never need what’s being sold. Ultimately, the Chinese love to go shopping and backpackers hate to load down their packs. And we have a shoestring budget, whereas Chinese love to spend on useless crap just to show off to their friends back home. So I’ve felt the touts should actually leave us alone and focus their efforts on the people who are more likely to buy.
Dali, Home of Tough Fish
Like in Yangshuo, there are a lot of “Western” places in Dali, though I’ve found the food is not to the same standard. So after a somewhat disappointing dinner we decided that the beer would be cheaper at a Chinese hole-in-the-wall. We ended up at a place that had a tank full of fish. One of these fish kept trying to jump out. He tried everything. He climbed the wall in the corner of the tank by bouncing his body off of each side. He tried to launch himself off the backs of the other fish. It was all very entertaining. Fearing that the fish was getting not only bolder but smarter, the staff put a wooden plank over the tank. Undaunted, he kept trying, repeatedly bonking his head on the plank. Then he wedged himself in a crack between the tank and the lid, and tried to get just enough leverage that he could climb on top of the plank. He came close a couple of times, so the staff put a bucket of water on top of the plank so that he couldn’t move the plank anymore. Still, though, BONK! BONK! BONK!
By the time we left, we were four and had been invited to a barbeque at a nearby hostel. You can’t really argue with that. Watching Aussies and French debate the finer points of barbeque management can be quite entertaining. At one point, an Englishman came running out to the courtyard, in quite a state of panic. A fish he’d started to scale had come back to life! They’d bought the fish at the market that afternoon. He’d spent several hours without water in a plastic bag in the fridge – they thought he was dead when they bought him. He even spent an hour on a chair before anyone got around to the preparation work. And yet, here he was, still alive. Well, we couldn’t eat him. Rather, he was deposited into the hostel’s fish pond and christened Houdini.
Dali, Part Two
You know you’re in a backpacker spot when you’re relaxing under the sun in a beautiful garden, not far from your $2 a night bed, sipping ginger tea with Bob Marley in the background. It’s ridiculously cliche but what can you do? The garden is at my guesthouse and I’ve been totally unable to get anything done but writing and relaxing in the mornings because I simply don’t want to leave. Cheap ginger tea and good French toast don’t hurt either.
Dali, the old part, has some mildly interesting traditional buildings, but is mainly a tourist trap. Great masses of Chinese package tourists swarm the streets and go shopping. Only a handful of them ever explore the surrounding areas, which is what myself and my Aussie friend Richie did. There is a mountain range behind the city. The most accessible one, Zhonghe Shan, has a chairlift but also hiking trails. There are a few shrines along the way and a touristy temple/lookout area where the chairlift lets off. Climbing a little ways from here is a guesthouse, which is the jumping-off point for two trails. One leads to the summit (4090m) and the other back down. The trail down is great fun – very with many drops requiring much clambering and climbing. The path, we were told, leads to a road that is being built up to the top of the chairlift. We were supposed to follow the road back to town, but noticed that our trail continued on the other side.
This was steeper and even more fun than before. The scenery looked quite familiar as the climate here is temperate, so lots of pines and no bamboo, palms or rice paddies. The path petered out after thirty minutes or so and a loud river was nearby. We inched our way through the undergrowth into the gorge, and finished with a six-foot jump onto a pathway that sat along a channel of water above the river.
This path lead to a spectacular series of small waterfalls, as steep drops and huge boulders broke up the river into several rushing cascades. The water was freezing, but a little wading facilitated incredible views of inaccessbile falls upstream and through the gorge out to Dali and Erhai Lake below. All in all, it was three very fulfilling hours back to town.
Once in town, it was dinnertime. We stopped at a Chinese place and were told to sit in the front. It was starting to cool off and we were in shorts and T-shirts so we wanted to sit closer to the kitchen for warmth, but eventually we relented. Well, it seems that the restaurant was at that point officially “laowai”-approved and the once empty tables filled rapidly.
Tags: China, Dali, Kunming, Travel
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