Yunnan: Part 1

This is Alex again, I am going to divide this final blog in to 2 parts since apparently I made my last entry too long! (sorry Taylor).
Part 1: We left Chengdu last Sunday on an overnight train to Kunming, in the Yunnan province. The train was quite an experience - we slept in hard sleeper which is a bed, but they are stacked 3 high and not in private cabins. It wasn't too bad - we had the top bunks so we kind of could escape from everyone staring at us, though we couldn’t sit up all the way. We got to Kunming on Monday morning and immediately found a bus to Dali, which was our final destination for the day. The "bus" was more like a packed van and it was a LONG five hour trip. When we got there, we actually got dropped off in “new” Dali, i.e. Xiaguan, and we had to take another bus to the old part of Dali. The town itself was pretty cool - cobblestone streets and nice shops and restaurants. Dali used to be surrounded by a wall but only really the gates are left.

There were a lot of westerners in Dali and they looked more like they belonged at Woodstock, sporting long dreadlocks, shapeless clothes, bare feet, etc. I'm not really sure why they were there...maybe preparing for a sojourn to Tibet? Obviously the residents of Dali had taken note because all the shops sold things you expect in some pot shop. Furthermore, all these old women dressed in Bai (an ethnicity) clothing keep asking us if we wanted to buy pot from them. It was very disconcerting; don't worry, we passed.

From Dali we took another bus to Lijiang and this one kept stopping at random places and letting people off/picking them up. The old part of Lijiang was cool as well, full of winding cobblestone streets and old buildings. However, yet again, Chinese tourism at its best, the place was packed with shops selling the same thing and had a lot more Chinese tour groups there then Dali. This means that Sarah and I felt like zoo animals whenever we were around them because they all stare and try to take our picture. One day we got a ride to Baisha, which was supposed to be a cool town north of Lejiang. It was pretty cool, just another little old town, but still touristy and people trying to sell us stuff all the time. Sarah wanted to see some frescos we had read about in the book, so we went to see those in Baisha – they were probably really pretty once but had been pretty much destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

We decided to walk home from Baisha by wandering around through the countryside in the general direction of Lijiang. I think that has been my favorite part of China, walking through the country where there is no tourism. All the farmers were threshing their wheat, and they seem so shocked to see a westerner off the beaten trail. It is interesting that here you only see old/middle aged men, but mostly women, in the fields working the crops because all the young people have gone to the cities to find jobs. It makes me wonder who is going to farm when these people are too old to keep farming.

The pictures do not have anything to do with what Alex wrote, I just like them so here is a short explanation of each: (1) famous three pagodas in Dali, (2) Alex walking/wandering outside Dali, (3) our hostel called "Tibet Lodge" or something like that on one of the busiest streets in Dali, very good people watching, (4) Alex and I in front of the famed ancient water wheel in Lijiang, (5) Naxi script, one of the last pictographic scripts left in use today, (6) batik (a special kind of one-color dyed cloth) being made in Lijiang.