Xizhou
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2007
1
7
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Dali,
Yunnan,
China
Friday, February 8, 2008
I blame what happened that day on 2 things. The first, that I slept with both the heater and electric blanket on and thus went and overheated and made a very dopey decision. The second is that I am a pigheaded idiot who once she has decided to do something is too stubborn to give up on it, despite more than sufficient evidence suggesting that it was perhaps a silly thing to do. I have gotten myself into really dumb situations all over the world because of this (I feel my biggest) character flaw. Walking to Xizhou was not as bad as when I walked to Castelnaud from Sarlat (twice the distance in the rain, along the muddy bank of a French highway), not by a long shot, but given that there are plenty of nice places to walk in Dali, I don't know why I got it into my head that I should walk to a shit hole like Xizhou except that it seemed like a good idea at the time. At least Castelnaud had an awesome castle at the end of the walk...
Anyway, when I got out of bed that morning, brain nicely poached, I thought, wacko, let's walk to Xizhou! It is a village 12 kms from Dali, although in the very hot sunshine it felt more like 20. I chatted to lots of Bai women on the way (the Bai are one of the many minority groups in China) who all kept insisting that was almost there... every half hour. While they weren't so good at judging distances they turned out to be extremely good at directions, especially the direction of the nearest toilet, which was invariably behind the local hospital/clinic of whatever little village I happened to be passing through. The toilets weren't too bad actually (despite the lack of walls or cubicles... the lack of people about meant it didn't really matter) but having to sneak past dirty hospital rooms and garbage cans full of empty drip packs, tubes and other scary looking stuff on the way was a little off putting. I kept expecting to get chased off by irrate nurses or something, but the two hospitals I wandered into that day were apparently deserted, except for one sunburnt foreigner, desperate for a place to pee.
When I finally made it to Xizhou, I visited a couple of really boring old houses. Xizhou has a name for having charming traditional Bai houses... but I think by walking there, I'd actually already gotten my fill of old Bai buildings in the 20 or so Bai villages I'd wandered through between Dali and Xizhou. Plus the ones in the other villages looked a lot less like they'd been rebuilt/scrubbed up to please tourists and more like people actually lived in them. I bought some snacks and a shitload of water before taking a minibus back to Dali. Slept like a log. A very bright red log because I got sunburnt. Again.
