Happy New Year from Dali. This historic old town in central Yunnan is sandwiched between the 250 square kilometre Lake Erhai to the East and the 13,000 feet Jade Green Mountains that tower over the town’s western perimeter. Dali old town was established centuries ago by the Bai people during the heyday of their Nanzhao Kingdom that exerted power over what is now south-west China, and upper Burma. But things came to a very sticky end for them in the mid 13th century when they were convincingly trounced by Kublai Khan’s outcome-focused Mongol hordes. Fortunately the only hordes sweeping through Dali these days are peaceful tourists, but conveniently for us, not at this time of the year. We have just spent ten days here, and while the nights have been very cold, the days have been sunny and pleasant for walking through what is possibly the most laid-back, relaxing town in all of China.Many of the photogenic old buildings have been preserved and put to use as tourist shops and a surely unsustainable profusion of various-themed cafes. We’re sitting in one of them right now – Jack’s Café, self-proclaimed “Shelter from the norm”. That’s a fair enough description today. The temperature outside this afternoon has dropped to little above zero and we scurried down the street to look for a warm nest for a few hours. Jack’s fits the bill very nicely. We have a table with our backs to the open fire (room heating seems to be a rarity in Dali possibly because of the generally mild climate), and we have just finished a Spanish olive pizza for lunch that was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly because we have found the food served in western-style cafes here to be underwhelming. The best food is the local chinese in the cafes in the residential part of town and just outside the city walls. But after several weeks of eating only Chinese food, it’s a pleasant change to sit down to a pizza or the like, or as we have done for the past three nights, to an Indian curry at the Namaste Restaurant just down the road from Jack’s.
Arriving by air, Dali old town is a 45 minute drive from the airport on the other side of the lake, and the local taxis seem to have stitched up a very nice monopoly for themselves in transporting passengers over that route. We checked into the Shengyuan Binguan (strangely also known as Sam’s Hotel, no doubt to give it some western cred even if in name only), just outside the South Gate of the rectangular city perimeter wall. There’s a lot to do around old Dali besides merely sauntering around the attractive cobbled streets and checking out the cafes although this itself could easily soak up several pleasurable days. We were in Dali on Christmas Day and while we could have gone to any one of a number of inexpensive Christmas Lunches advertised in café windows, we opted for local fresh dumplings prepared and steamed in front of us at a small shop in a quiet residential alleyway well away from the main tourist streets. We had two bamboo baskets-full, one of mixed vegetable and the other pork and soup dumplings. They were both excellent and fueled us until the evening when we rugged up and returned through the city wall for dinner at Jim’s Peace Café. There were some westerners in this part of town, mostly Europeans it seemed.
We did a few day trips into the surrounding countryside. We caught a bus 40km to the north to browse through the Monday Bai market in the village of Shaping and detoured on the way back to spend an hour in the village of Xizhou that contains some well-preserved Bai architecture. The following day we made it to the top of the mountains that tower over Dali – this is a sweaty two-hour walk up a near-sheer path. But we did it in 20 minutes. That’s because we caught the cable car, the longest and most relaxing cable ride we’ve been on. It drifted silently upwards through soft–needled pine forest, overlooking Chinese tombs closeted in the vegetation below. At the top we hiked the 12 km Long March trail; a misnomer because it was a very easy walk along a near-flat, attractive pathway cut into the mountainside. The views over the old town, the Dali plain and the lake were tremendous. And yesterday we went boating on the vast lake itself, crossing to the other side to Guanyin Pavilion, an ancient temple complex, and then on to Jinsuo Island to stroll for a few minutes along the waterfront of a small fishing village.
Ten days in Dali didn’t seem too long. It’s that sort of place.
