dali. yunnan. china. december 13th - 19th

i am writing this months later, and feel so removed from our time in dali that i think this will end up a very short, succinct entry. dali. a small town, easy to navigate, easy to linger too long in, somewhere we didn't end up doing the things that maybe we should have. we arrive from shaxi, and get to our guesthouse relatively easily, and after settling in to our room, we wander in search of food. dali is split up in to the old town and new town, we find ourselves in old town, and it is quite small and easy to walk around, so searching for one of my 'ever elusive' vegetarian restaurants proves quite easy here. after a nice meal, we wander to the west gate in time for sunset, then we wander south, and reach the south gate all lit up at night, so have seen the east, west and south gates already in our first few hours here. after dinner, some random wandering. we stumble across a square where a performance of traditional instruments is about to take place, and we are among few who stay to watch the whole thing. in all, our first night here the vibe seems pretty chilled, and like a good place to unwind from the intense experiences of the past two weeks.





the next day is much the same, aimless wandering through the old town, eating, chilling out. we visit the north gate today, and now have been to the four cardinal points of the old town. not much to say, it is nice here, but not as alluring as the two previous places we have been. for some reason we are unmotivated to make it out to erhai lake today, one of the main attractions of dali, the other being cangshan mountain. details and days blend a bit, and the events that ensue are a bit hard to seperate. first disappointment seems trivial, but it actually ends up absorbing alot of our time. long story short, this turns out to be the most difficult, and expensive, city yet to get our laundry done in. i end up at a guesthouse on the other end of the old town where i am charged 3X as much as we have been paying elsewhere in china to do our laundry. there are two pluses to this though, we bump in to angela (from shaxi) at the guesthouse the first day when i am inquiring whether or not i can bring my laundry here to have it washed, and when i go to pick it up the next afternoon, i run in to mei from panba guesthouse who is in dali for the afternoon from lijiang! days spent wandering the old town snapping photos, catching sunset, eating.








at some point, stephen gets sick, not sure if it's food related, but after a night of visits to the bathroom, the next day is spent entirely in bed recovering. at some point also, we have changed rooms in our guesthouse, from a very large airy room with lots of windows, to the nice enough but smaller room that doesn't compare where we find ourselves when stephen gets sick. he recovers slowly, only to have it hit me two days later. the same story unfolds for me, but somehow inbetween the two events we make it up to cangshan mountain for the afternoon. it begins as a lovely respite from the city, the air is cool and clean, the view lovely, the quiet and isolation peaceful, but for some reason my mood shifts and the day ends on a bit of a lower note. nice enough afternoon though overall with a spectacular cable car ride up and down the mountain, and a really needed break from the old town which is wearing thin for me.






in all of our wanderings we travel back and forth on ren min lu many times a day. our hotel is at one end of this street, the restaurants at the other. this is the part of dali that wears on me the most, each day i am progressively exposed to more and more sights that i wish i had never had to witness. as in most of china, this road is lined with restaurants which display their meat in the form of raw animal carcasses hanging from the front. i have come to learn to accept this as part of our travels, but avert my eyes and avoid it in any way possible, something a bit difficult in this narrow lane. what i hadn't learned yet, and quickly figure out, is that these animals are freshly processed daily, and if you get up early enough in the morning, it is happening right in front of the establishments in question. this began with me seeing slumped animal hides, ears, hooves and all, from the freshly skinned animals, just laying on the ground, just tossed aside. it made me sick to see, and after a short walk, i start using my umbrella as a shield to block my view. i had already begun to try walking a different route as well, but i hadn't fully learned my lesson yet when on one of our last days here i glance up quickly to witness (for 1 second) a stage of processing the animals that i will not describe and i have tried very hard to erase from my memory since. it was the final thing for me, after being worn down by this day by day, i am ready to leave dali.




in hindsight, we should have probably stayed on the mountain, or on the lake, somewhere we didn't even end up seeing! but we didn't know what to expect upon arrival, and getting sick sort of made it difficult to move locations, both physically, and on a motivational level. in it's defense, we visited dali after lijiang and shaxi, two places where our experiences were exceptional, so it had alot to live up to, it is not hard to see why it fell short. neither one of us would suggest that it is not worth a visit, but for us, it did not sit well, and we wish we hadn't lingered so long. under different circumstances we may have seen more of the beauty of dali, but for now, it remains a bit of a disappointing experience for us, not one that we regret, but one we wish we could have experienced differently.