We boarded the train in Guilin and followed the smooth rails west to the city of Kunming. Well....lost right from the start! Dang. Lost in Kunming again and again as we traversed the streets from dumpling stands to puppy markets to the wonderful museum full of Yunnan artifacts dating back to 475 BC and some even older! Lost again - only a few street signs with English on them. Two hours of circling before we pulled out the compass to guide us home!
We headed west by train again to the end of the line at Old Dali (35 Yuan for a 350km train ride, that's four bucks!), where the sky is blue and the air is clear. The scenery along the way is beautiful verdant hills holding compact cute villages all neat and tidy. Our train squeals like an elephant when she blows her horn. Some of the tunnels are perhaps 2km long...tunnel after tunnel! Dali is great with walking only streets of stone and mountain vistas. We ascended the mountain by chairlift (tehee tehee...we're taking the easy trekking approach to things) for a cool stone pathway walk to a deep valley...very peaceful and the fresh air hopefully cleaned out the pollution that the rest of China drinks in daily. Yunnan province is the only part of China where someone with a respiratory problem or asthma could travel. After birthday Bruce dinner and drinks (with our Basque friend Enyaki) and more beers with guitars in hands at a music jamming bar we headed home to a locked guesthouse! Ahhhhh...there are curfews in China...yes yes. A little gentle knocking roused a pyjama clad gal, lucky for us!
Today we're in Lijiang. We're about as close to Tibet as you can get, and the monasteries and Tibetans are amongst us now. Huge minority populations exist in Yunnan, and the colourful dress of each group are absolutely beautiful (Naxi, Bai, Dhong, Maio, Tai and more). Yulong mountain (5000m) stabs the sky and flanks this world heritage town. We negotiated our way through an absolute maze of cobblestone walkways leading you astray every which way and lined by old tile roofed buildings packed together like tumbling lego. What a web we wandered through to find a room...just impossible to not get lost in this town! This ancient city is by far the most interesting city I've ever seen....beautiful, and flanked by a massive mountain!
