Walk around the fields above Dali, Yunnan, South-West China
We had ended up with a booking for a night bus from Dali to Kunming, from where we would fly to Chengdu (and the friendly travel agent near our hotel had managed to extract the booking fee from us twice over – watch out!). This meant we had most of the second day to while away in Dali, which was fine but we had kindof run out of things to do. Maybe we should have got a chairlift up the mountain and walked some of the trails up there, but it was in cloud and not everyone in the party was keen on the idea. Lonely Planet said it was a "super hike" but some solo walkers had been robbed up there.
Instead, after checking out of the hotel and getting their agreement to hang onto our packs until the evening, we went for a wander round town and had tea in Foreigner Street (covered elsewhere). Then we walked up Foreigner Street and across the busy road past Marley’s restaurant where we had enjoyed an excellent meal the evening before. There were more stalls selling tourist items on the other side, attended by women in brightly coloured traditional dress (see photo). At the top of the street we reached the “taxi rank”, with lots of horses and cabs, and motorised tricycle taxis. They seemed to encircle us like a wagon train under attack, but it was us who were the objects of attention as one after another tried to attract our custom.
We dodged around them, one by one, as we crossed the road under construction, past an ornamental footbridge that appeared destined to be a feature in a future walkway, making for the main street on the other side. This led straight up towards the mountain, and presented a strange spectacle. Banners hung over the street, and it looked like some sort of processional route. But it was virtually deserted. First there were more roadworks, down the right-hand side, which looked like pipes being laid. Then there were the shops lined up on both sides, but all with their timber doors locked shut. Halfway up, just one shop was open, with the owners sitting outside playing mahjong! We carried on up the street as another taxi driver continued vainly trying to entice us into the cab.
Finally, at the end of the line of shops, there was a new showroom standing separately on the right advertising properties for sale, whilst on the left a vast expanse of derelict concrete and iron market stalls were spread out. We stopped for a few minutes, puzzling what these could be, then walked on up the road which bent left then right past houses and a few children calling out “hello”. Towards the end of the road, we could see a pathway between the houses to the right, and found ourselves on the edge of a series of terraced fields sloping gently down towards the old town, with the lake beyond.
This was unexpected (we hadn’t really had much idea where our walk was taking us), but welcome. We were able to pick a route along narrow paths on the grassy edges of the terraces, leading across towards wooded slopes where stones were positioned in a way which suggested it was a cemetery. The most striking aspect was the number and variety of butterflies which fluttered around us, and we spotted dragonflies as well. Two or three women were working on the terraces below us, and waved as we passed.
We were making for a line of old buildings on the other side of the terraced slope, and our route became a bit difficult to follow in places, but there was always a path going one way or another which eventually took us onto a track leading up to a high wall and on past some houses. A little further on, and we reached the chairlift station, which we had sort-of expected to find at the top of the road we had walked up from Foreigner Street. We weren’t intending to go up the mountain now, but were finally persuaded to take a horse and cab back down the hill to the taxi rank we had left about an hour and a half earlier.
As we turned to rejoin the street we had walked up, the driver told us that the collection of derelict market stalls were used for an annual fair when the Bai people gathered. That would explain the banners over the street. Nevertheless, we still couldn’t work out how there could possible be enough business to sustain all the shops which were locked up on either side – maybe they had simply gone out of business, or had been built as a great project in anticipation of an expansion in tourism.
It all made for a fascinating and informal little walk in the countryside, in contrast to the carefully laid out routes which we followed elsewhere on our travels, but with hindsight I think it would have been worth making the trip up the chairlift and exploring the trails on the mountain. I hadn't really realised this was possible before we arrived in Dali, so hadn't set my sights on it. That made two lessons from Dali in reading the guidebook properly before arriving somewhere (after failing to find the museum at the Three Pagodas).
We had some more time to kill in Dali, browsing around shops and then going for a final meal back at the Tibetan Lodge before catching a cab in heavy rain to the new city of Dali, a few kilometres to the south, for our night bus to Kunming (NOT a great experience).
Contributed by: Andrew Llanwarne
Photos by Andrew, Owen and Catriona Llanwarne
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