We finished up our stay in Lijiang, and set out for fresh pastures in the town of Dali a few hours away. Dumped by the bus at the fringes of the town we spent an hour wandering around in heavy packs and oppressive heat looking for the town, until we discovered that our guide book map was out of date and the bus station had apparently moved. Back on track we found a very nice room in a hotel with ensuite for $10 per night. Dali is another small town aimed at the tourist, it is very cheap (you can survive for $10-15 a day quite happily) with lots of markets and pedestrian only streets, but not quite as pretty as Lijiang's "ancient city". It specialises in stoneware and marble, which is very cheap to buy here, stone vases, birdbaths, statues and carvings, gems and minerals etc. We re-met John, a Tibetan fellow traveller from our Jeep and an NZ beekeeper from Geraldine called Craig and an Estonian who I am sure was called Renault (it's not just Germans who name people after cars), for cheap BBQ meat skewer dinner from a street vendor.
Following day we hired bicycles to cycle down to the huge lake (Taupo sized) a few kilometers away. This was pretty miss-able except for the entertainment of riding a bike with a seat made of leather covered masonry over rough farm tracks for a few miles and then carrying said bikes cross country over irrigation systems to try to get where we wanted to go when we got ourselves a little misplaced. We stopped for a quick snack at a warf where we had a "waterbird" - think roasted sparrow on a stick - while avoiding other delights such as a huge bullfrog, and dragonfly nymphs which the vendor assured us would give us the shits (with funny hand actions). Back to town we decided against taking the cable car to see Dali JAM (just another monastry) and had a lazy afternoon wandering the streets and markets.
Kunming came after a 5 hour bus ride the next morning and with a couple of hours to kill before katching a train to Guilin we went to the Bird Market which sells pets of all types and also has a fantastic arts market. Hectares of shops with amazing furniture, carvings, stoneware, paintings, glassware, antiques etc. If I ever become one of those boring and smug home-owning types I will be coming back here to fill a container with furnishings and various objet d'art. On to the train for Guilin and remet John yet again.
After overnighting on the train we finally left Yunnan and arrived in Guilin a few hundred kilometers from Hongkong in the middle of a monsoon downpour, the first rain we had encountered since entering china three weeks ago. We got wet waiting for the taxi to take us to the city. We got far wetter unloading from the taxi in the middle of the city in the middle of a large public square. We ran for an awning and planned our movements. 1st buy umbrellas (which process got the wetness level up to the point that umbrellas were basically pointless), 2nd look for accomodation. John and Rob wandered around for 30 minutes looking for anything reasonable (nothing under $10 per person found), and getting pissed off with the city, we decamped from our awning to a nearby McDonalds where we started to dry and gorged on bad food for $3 each. Decision made we left the city to travel to Yangshou, a tourist village an hour away and nestled on the Li River in amazing countryside with huge steep rock columns of 1-300m rising all over a relatively flat river plain, a bit like Monument Valley in the US (Favorite for Western movies) but wet.
Yangshou is a great wee village of waterways, rocky spires, and cafes. We found cheap accomodation, though we had to endure the hard sell on tours from our hotel patron for an hour. Eventually got through to him that we didn't want them, and certainly not at 4 times the market rate. We went out for dinner, where we were treated to the amazing sight of two hot air balloons dipping down over the steep rocky hills surrounding the village, one of which touched down on a pond surrounded by restaurants before lifting off and flying away again. We came back to massacre the 30 mosquitos that had made it into our room (very satisfying in purported malaria country), then watched american cheerleading competitions (think synchronised gymnastics) with chinese commentary on TV, and listened to a scottish guy doing his nut at the aforementioned hotel patron at 1am about how he wanted his money back after being ripped off on something or rather.
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