Ahhh Dali. Though art in my heart!
After the trip from Jinghong arriving in Dali was a bit of an overload. It was the first of a couple of cities we went to that was heavily crowded by Chinese tourists. And we managed to bike straight into the worst spot of the entire city as soon as we got there. And believe me. After more than a week of something close to wilderness and desolation thousands of tourists is not an attractive sight... So I told Mikele harsh as I can be: "This fucking sucks! I can't deal with it. Let's get the fuck outta here!"
Luckily Mikele is much better at keeping calm than I am so he persuaded me to eat some food at a street stall and talk it over. I was constantly coming with negative outbursts so Mikele had two rather annoying situations on his hands there. The tourists he wasn't there with and the tourist he was there with. But damn you did good Mikele!
After eating and getting a bit used to the situation I calmed down enough to go to look for a place to stay. Of course I was still constantly hammering Mikele with how crappy the city was and how expensive the hotel would be. And of course we found a very nice cheap one...
After showering and resting our sore bums for a while we were ready to tackle the hell outside the hotel. So we went out and found out that it is very very easy to avoid the tourist masses that basically prefer to stay on one street. Food was great city was great and I started to realise that I had been a horrible pain in the ass earlier in the day. But that's how it goes I guess...
I think we ended up spending around a week in Dali. Polishing off our bargaining skills in the great nice market and in super overpriced souvenir shops. And eating endless amounts of Porkies that made the poor toilet in our room work overtime. Oh the smell in that room. Still having horrible flashbacks.
We did a few excursions out of Dali. One was to Kunming. Province capitol of Yunnan. We weren't very excited. We just wanted Dali...
But after having stayed there exceptionally long for a random stop on a bike trip we remembered that it actually was a bike trip we were doing. So we packed the bags and got ready to leave our beloved hotel and hosts.
We shall return! we said with tears in our eyes as we headed north with some xtra kilos on our bellies.
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| First picture in Dali. The guy who bossed the creature wanted money for me taking the picture. I pretended not to understand... |
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| One of Dalis city gates. |
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| Dali trash bin. |
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| Fooooood! |
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More food!!!!
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| Uhm yeah. Never mind. |
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| Fermented tofu! Nice and spicy and cheeselike! |
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| Psychedelic lady counting her gangster roll. |
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| Funky rad moped. |
