Dali
Trip Start
Oct 30, 2005
1
62
122
Trip End
Ongoing
Dali,
China
Sunday, April 9, 2006
We talked away for an hour or so, but being so late at night, we thought it only fair for the rest of the people in our compartment that we go to bed. This train was much nicer than the one we had in Vietnam, and the meaning of "hard sleeper" was not so literal here - we had padding - as well as pillows, sheets and blankets.
Unfortunately all of these extra comforts did not help us to sleep that well and we arrived in Dali at about 6am the next morning feeling very tired
Cloud Pass
.On arriving in Dali, the local bus that we were told should be waiting to take us to the old town was nowhere in sight. There were only taxis wanting to charge way too much money or minibuses wanting to take us to Lijiang.
The bus finally arrived (which we discovered thanks to some generous locals) and we raced to get on the bus before a huge group of Chinese tourists spotted it. It was slightly amusing to see them all running for the bus with their luggage trailing behind them, as it drove up right next to us and we jumped on. Very unusual for us to be able to get on first.
The bus trip to Dali took around 30 minutes. We arrived in the old town which was quite quaint and beautiful, but unfortunately we had trouble finding our way around with the limited maps we had. After being hassled by accommodation touts we finally found the place we wanted to stay at but unfortunately it was full. Eventually we found something else that was open at that time of morning and settled in - and managed to sleep for most of the day!
In the afternoon we went into town and took a walk down to the north gate of the old city. We climbed to the top of the gate to get a better view of the city (Glenn of course negotiating the entry fee down to half).
After dinner we went back to the hotel for a nice hot shower as they had problems with the water earlier in the day
Dali Old Town (1)
. The water was actually heated by a furnace and pumped by a generator. They didn't seem to like to turn the generator on unless we hassled them about it constantly and even then it seemed like too much of an effort (all this despite the fact that they supplied "24 hours hot water"). Feeling a bit stinky from the sleeper train and not having a shower all day, we decided that we would need to change hotels and Glenn managed to find one just down the road that was much more modern, with hot water, at a much cheaper price. We moved out first thing the next morning!In the afternoon we took the local bus to visit the three pagodas. Along the way the bus picked up a couple of monks who were interested in talking to us but they didn't speak English and we didn't speak Chinese so there were just awkward moments of pointing and laughing at each other.
We arrived at the three pagodas, took one look at the outrageous entry fee and decided that there must be an easier and cheaper way (we had heard that there was). We walked around the outside of the pagoda complex, through a local village, but there seemed to be no way around the massive boundary fences. As we got to the back of the complex, we noticed that there was a big gap in the fence as they were doing some construction work in the area
Dali Old Town (2)
. We started to walk towards it and were called back by a guard, damn it! We then noticed a heap of construction trucks about to drive through the opening and we tried to discreetly run along side them as they entered (yes this was Glenn's idea!) but we got busted and gave up the fight. We wouldn't be getting any closer to the three pagodas today - but we had fun trying!The next day we got up early to visit the mountain known as Chang Shan. We took a chairlift up to the top of one side of the mountain and then took the 11km trek along the "cloud pass" which was not a real trekking feat, but did go past some beautiful scenery with a wonderful view of Dali, and it gave us a little bit of exercise for our Tiger Leaping Gorge trek which is coming up soon. At the end of the trek we took the cable car down. It was really windy that day and Christie decided at that point that she didn't like cable cars, Glenn being cheeky hassling her the whole way down.
The following day we decided it was time to leave Dali for Lijiang. We went to inquire about buses and found out that there was a minibus that left in 20 minutes. So we raced back to our hotel, checked out, then raced back to the bus station to find our bus pulling up as we arrived. Being the last ones on the bus, Glenn and the bus driver had lots of fun trying to squish our packs into the luggage compartment and we also got stuck on the back seat, which sat up higher than the rest of the seats on the bus - meaning we couldn't see out of the windows!
