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German Bakery
The things you discover after spending three or four days in place make it worthwhile to stay long enough to see beyond the surface. On our last morning we met the owner of this impeccably run German bakery. What an opportunity for locals to learn German baking and perhaps set off to run their own…
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All Hands On Deck For Rice Harvest On Lake Er
Enjoy that rice, it was a lot of trouble to grow and harvest.
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Communication
Sometimes a small misunderstanding can have surprising results such as this delicious albeit entirely excessive eight course meal. Somehow ‘Can you recommend something?’ came across as ‘We’d like to order for us and our six friends who are about to join us’. It was so ridiculously that a Chinese tourist took a picture of us.
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Mystery Courtyard
For all the bustling and excess of the main streets of Dali there are plenty of stories to be learned beyond the surface. The Mosques reminders of a late 19th century uprising to found a Muslim state. Back streets covered in grain to be dried. Uniformed schoolchildren walking in small groups nearly always with the…
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Could You Say ‘No’ to This Man?
Near the top of the chair lift leading some 500 meters up the slope of Dahei from Dali sits a small temple. After making it through some harrowing bus rides unharmed we had the intention of making a small donation thanking the spirits for their kindness. Curiously we peek into the temple and observe the…
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Dali Dinner
We especially recommend the mushrooms, squash and chicken. The local carp from Er lake is delicious but you need to work around the bones. Remember not to use your fingers to get them out of your mouth, spitting them on the ground is much more proper.
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Hard Sleeper
This is Cranky building his middle bunk on the train to Dali. He had just painstakingly explained the numbering system of the hard sleeper beds to an elderly Chinese couple using multiple permutations of all the 27 words in his Mandarin vocabulary. His system analysis stemmed from his experience with two soft sleeper rides and…
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Ping’an Rice Fields
The rice fields are beautiful but the people more so and they are exquisite cooks of rice in charred bamboo hollows and vegetables of all sorts.