Yunnan Province, Kunming to Dali (Marcus)

So I typed out a post the other day from Kunming about our trip from Chengdu to there and well, the interwebs swallowed it.

We are now in the town of Dali, well into our tour of Yunnan Province. There are actually two completely different sides to Dali - the 'new' Dali, which is just like every other chinese city out there, but smaller(population 1 million), and a few kilometres away, the original town called Old Dali. This place is absolutely magnificent, but before I talk about it, i'll briefly talk about how we got here.

The trip from Chengdu was long and quite difficult really. We were so so so glad to get out of the place as the weather was just horrible. The sweat factor was massive, us poor little Melbournites wilting under such high heat and humidity.

Our train cabin had a Chinese woman and her mother occupying the top bunks and as per usual, they had a three year old child with them also. You'd hardly know there were restrictions on birth in this country; there are kids absolutely _everywhere_. The father was also in there, but he had bought we think a cheaper bed in the hard sleeper cabin which adjoined ours.

They were nice enough, very limited english, but we didn't interact overly with them. Being locked in a cabin with a chinese family is about as in your face cultural difference as you can really get - and it makes everything difficult. We thought the kid might actually be of an age where he's above misbehaving/mucking around - but it goes to show how much we know, he was a shocker! If it could be switched on or moved or dropped or adjusted, he was all over it. Come 3:30am he was bawling his eyes out for a good 15 minutes. We were having enough trouble trying to sleep let alone this kid screaming at the top of his lungs.

At one point the whole family are eating this non-descript meat from a plastic bag. They're slurping the meat out then eating it making that slopping eat-with-your-mouth-open noise that just drives me batty. They had juice positively running down their mouths and hands. The father turns to me and offers me some - I declined and he smiled, saying, "Rabbit!" I then had an actual look at what they were eating, and sure enough, they were sucking the meat out of rabbit skulls. They had 4-5 rabbit skulls in their little bonepile. Ick!

So we arrived in Kunming completely and utterly tired. When we're that tired, our patience level is at an all-time low. We hailed a cab with relative success; only one complete fatass of a man stealing one from us, then our taxi driver firstly could understand Courtney's saying of the hotel, street and address, and even better, actually knew the hotel. He even gave us a free map along the way, score!

The hotel was gaudy beyond belief in true Chinese style. We didn't get to really see much of Kunming but what immediately stood out was the lack of pollution. Sure there was a little haze, but it was mostly very clear. This alone raised our spirits and had us walking around the local area checking it out.

By this stage we had checked in(painfully as always) and were absolutely starving. We wandered down the same street as the hotel and basically jumped into the nearest decent looking restaurant. Turns out this place was a huge indoor almost arena style place with tables arrayed in various positions to watch a stage. You see Yunnan province has a lot of China's minority cultures, and here was a place where they put on a stage show. We were given a seat up on a balconey and ordered food as we watched the single largest group of foreigners we've yet seen together in one place get ushered in to tables down below - front and centre for a show. Bonus! So the show came on and it was cheesy and felt like one of those cheap crappy shows you see in Australia where girls dance Rio de Janiro style - a la Rio's in Richmond. Crap as!

We met up with the tour group that night and were glad to find they're absolutely lovely people. Two older New Zealanders, a young asian american, a woman from Brisbane and another Intrepid tour guide who normally runs tours in Beijing but is on this as a sort of holiday. Our tour leader is also Chinese, this tiny girl who eats like a horse and is so superbly enthusiastic about shopping and a mega-tourist herself that she has us constantly cracking up. She's so cute and bubbly like a little girl, and keeps disappearing and returning to display all these things she's bought.

So for our first day we took the long distance bus from Kunming to Dali. The tour leader - Ammy(it's just Amy but she spells it with two M's) said it would be eight hours which had us kind of unhappy - considering all tour books say it's five hours. Turns out it was five hours or so - maybe a touch less, including a 30 minute lunch break. This was pretty funny as it was at a chinese 'fast food' restaurant which involved eating off trays identical to our school canteen, and even some of the same dishes! Ahh it feel's like it's been ten years since we've been in Wuxi.

Our hotel in Dali is fantastic. It's in this courtyard style hotel which winds all around a very peaceful garden. The old city of Dali has to be seen to be believed, it's absolutely beautiful. It's situated a few kilometeres away from Lake Erhai, China's 7th largest freshwater lake and around 120km drive around it. Behind the town is a large mountain range which almost constantly has clouds resting on the peaks.

The town itself has water working its way almost entirely through it. Beside almost every street is a fast running river of freshwater from the mountains. This has been harnessed into little waterfalls and rock gardens and you name it what else. I think it's this alone which gives the town magnificent character. There are some terrific old buildings and pagoda style towers and the like, but without the water it just wouldn't be the same.

Today we spent the entire day driving around lake Erhai. The minority people that live here are called the Bai(Bai meaning the colour white, in chinese). We made various stops in local villages, going through a market, a fishing village, taking a brief boat ride around a small island and the like. It was a wonderful experience. We got to see a very intimate, very real look at Chinese life in much smaller villages than we had seen before. The elderly Bai women all wear these smart looking blue suits which we will show photos of when we can.

That's all for now. I could go into infintessimal detail about what we've been doing but i'm way too tired.

We just had an interesting massage experience. Courtney has been coming down with a flu and I noticed they advertised various massages on this shop window, one being for 'cold and headache'. I have heard before massage is supposedly great when you're unwell - Mr Pan once was going to bring his sister over to massage a very sick Courtney. Anyhow this massage was off down this side alley in this little area, and rather than being done by blind people, was done by deaf and dumb people. If you wanted the massage harder or softer, you either made a particular hand gesture or pointed at a sign on the wall that had hard/soft and the relevant characters.

Was so far so good, the guy was working hard on my neck which was great as it's been sore as hell from all the bus travel when about 20 minutes into it Courtney suddenly says, "Marcus, I think we need to go, I feel sick." This alarmed me a little. We? I'm thinking and ask her, Do you need me to come look after you? To which she confirmed, and of course that was fine. I was worried about how she was feeling..but also feeling like there might have been a little more to it.

We get downstairs, we tell the main guy who can hear/speak/everything else that we're sorry, Courtney isnt feeling good, needs sleep, but we're happy to pay for the full hour as planned(40rmb each which wasnt too bad really), then making it clear to the deaf/dumb woman that what they were doing was fine, we get out of there.

I ask Courtney, "Are you ok??" and, "Was something dodgy going on?" to which she says, "Yes." Turns out the woman had walked over to lock the door - this I didn't think much of. Apparently, the guy massaging me was making motions to the woman massaging Courtney, pointing to her nearby handbag and making zipping motions. He then noticed Courtney was watching and pointed to his eyes to the other woman to let her know Courtney was watching. That's when Courtney said we're out of there - good call! VERY damned dodgy indeed, and the first real scam we've been a part of(that we're aware of) thus far.

By leaving in that manner and paying we avoided any trouble and were safely on our way at a small loss. Still, the 20 mins or so of massage was good and it was on my bad side of the neck. It makes me wonder though - was this these two people being opportunistic? This is a heavily touristed town, they often consider tourists as being outright dumb to things like that. Or was the owner of the massage place aware? I personally think they were being opportunistic, but I do not know. When we came down from the massage room to where other masseurs were waiting, an older woman came out and she seemed not happy with the two masseurs we had. I thought initially this might have been because we didn't like the massage and wanted to leave...or was it perhaps because she knew they'd either done something dodgy, OR rather, didn't care about the dodgy side, but moreso that they'd been busted? We'll never know.

Morale of the story is, never leave your bag out of eyesight/reach when being massaged!!

We're off to Lijiang tomorrow which is supposed to be an amazing albeit absolutely tourist infested city.

See you then!