Dali, June 20-22, 2008

Trip Start Jun 05, 2008
1
5
18
Trip End Ongoing


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Where I stayed
Green Lodge
(Dali hotels)

Flag of China  , Yunnan,
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Directly after receiving our visas to Myanmar in Kunming, we hopped onto a bus and headed five hours northwest in the Yunnan province to Dali.  Dali is an ancient walled city, now segmented into two segments (like many, many other ancient Chinese cities): Old Dali and New Dali.  We had heard from another traveler about an eco-hostel at the east gate of the city called the Green Lodge.  The hostel is full of Tibetan-style seating areas and an outdoor patio in the plaza looking out onto the beautiful old-style gate of the city, with a moat cutting through. The hostel actually rents the gate as well, so guests can go up on the wall and have an amazing view of Dali and its surrounding mountains.  The hostel also doubles as an organic vegetarian cafe, and the staff gets together everyday to cook meals for guests and community members.  One free meal is included with your stay there.  We arrived late at night and were immediately welcomed with a huge feast of delicious Indian food.  We ate most of our meals at the hostel thereafter, because it was some of the tastiest and healthiest food we've found in China.  The other thing in Dali we made sure to try was the local specialty of the region, baba bread.  It's soft, flaky bread, made either with green onions, honey, or meat, that we really loved.

The next day we took a walk from the Green Lodge down to the lake near Dali.  It was a beautiful stroll through endless miles of rice paddies, stretching across almost the whole length of the giant valley.  Dali is at the foot a tall mountain range, and when you're in the middle of rice paddies you can see the dark peaks surrounding you from all sides.  The incredible thing about Dali is that there is always, always puffs of white clouds hanging around the very tips of the mountains, which are slate-gray.  They're there 24 hours a day, no matter the weather, so at night you can make out the tips of the mountains by looking for the line of clouds in the sky.  We walked for nearly an hour in the farmland, passing a number of Chinese farmers heading out to the fields.

The scenery when we got to the lake was gorgeous, but not what we saw when we got closer:  a group of men holding the dark, stiff body of a dead dog, applying what seemed to be a blowtorch to its skin.  We were shocked but tried to ignore it and take in the view; that became increasingly difficult as the men sliced open the dog, dumped its guts into the lake, and proceeded to carve it with a chopping cleaver.  Even grosser was the fact that  maybe 20 people were swimming and bathing in the lake just 20 feet up the dock.  It was a disturbing image that reminded us where we really were!

The rest of the afternoon and evening had a (fortunately) different tone.  The Green Lodge was hosting a party open to the entire community, consisting of vegetarian buffet, live music, and an evening watching the sunset on the gate.  There were maybe 50 kids there with their parents, in addition to a large portion of the foreign backpacks in Dali at the time.  The food was incredible; the music was a mix of traditional Chinese performances and free-for-all jams combining Eastern and Western instruments, making for very interesting evening.
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