Dazzling Dali

Dali; an ancient walled city with a lake to the east and mountains to the west. Great food and markets (as per usual in China). We started off in a bad value youthhostel and moved to a spotless Korean Guesthouse with resturant downstairs. The two main streets in town are full of bars and resturants and are fairly pumping at night. Out towards the lake in some old buildings are a few great bars where we had a couple of beers and some fantastic chocolate cake. The mountians outside of town have a chairlift running up to over 4,000m (Dali itself is higher than Mt Kosiousko) and due to some heavy rain, we decided to take the chairlift up instead of the slippery path. A little monastery up the top and then a fantastic path in and out of gullies which ended up taking us the whole afternoon (a little over 12 ks)...problem was that our guidebook insisted that at the end of this walk we could get a public bus back into town...not the case. Another cable car ran down the mountain and it cost most of our days budget!!!! Well worth it though; fantastic walk. Our favorite place to eat in Dali was King's Park Kitchen, in a very old houses courtyard area. King is from Hong-Kong and has a very eccletic menu of chinese dishes. Our favs were the steamed whole fish (scooped out of the pond upon request) the bok-choy and shrooms with real blackbean sauce(again) and the steamed pork spare ribs (Not really up Clare's alley). Awesome woodfired pizza place and we splashed out on a couple of tomato and mushroom numbers!! For breakie there was a local style of flat bread called Baba; found a place that did fresh babas at about 9:30 and coupled with yogurt and fresh fruit, we had pretty good breakies in Dali.

chickens in a bag...

A french girl told us about a Friday market in a place called Yousuo, about 1 ½ north of Dali; the problem was, nobody in town had heard of it (even though it is supposed to be the biggest in Yunnan provence) and we had to do some real investigative work to get a bus there. But get a bus there we did and it was huge, with a mountainous backdrop and not another foriegner in sight. Pretty hot day and being crammed in with 1,000 of other people made for an intense experience...but this was the real deal. Lined up outside the market walls were stacks of horses, ponies and carts waiting to be loaded up with produce and marched back to the surrouding districts. Saw heaps of weird and wonderfull produce; no dogs though, we had to wait until Lijiang for that pleasure.

downtown dali

hanging meat...

market

mushrooms and bok choy

rice fields

steamy buns!!

the backdrop of dali

the long walk