Kunming to Dali

Our express bus to Dali. It was definitely time to leave Kunming. The 5-½ hour ride was on a Volvo bus, with Chinese style seats and a uniformed “bus attendant” whose main job was passing out spitting bags and a bottle of water. She also served the most important function- keeping the driver awake, which she did by a constant chatter for the entire 5 ½ hours. Chinese drivers are your worst nightmare. This one was fairly good, but even with that high praise, he still varied his speed constantly- with speed changes completely unrelated to road conditions.
We landed in Old Dali and found a taxi to take us to our hotel, the Jin Yuan. Staffed by cute little minority women dressed in traditional clothes, we checked into our double room. We dropped our bags and took to the streets of Dali. Touted in magazines and books as “Shangrila”, we soon found ourselves scratching our head in wonder. What was the attraction?

Photos courtesy of Flickr

The town basically consisted of two streets of Western cafes (serving banana pancakes and museli for breakfast, burgers and pizza for dinner), street vendors (selling the same stuff), massage parlors and shops. The one claim to fame is that they’re still housed in the old style buildings. We wandered through the town and found “Mr. China’s Son” café. It was opened by an old gentleman who wrote an English language account of his experiences during the Cultural Revolution. We bought his book and continued our walk.

We stopped at Café de Jack and got a cold beer and settled there for the evening. Dinner was wonderful. Two Dutch girls were dining on this cheese-covered dish which turned out to be Shepherd’s Pie, Dali style. It was their second night having the same thing-so we decided to give it a try. It was so good- mashed potatoes over some kind of veggie filling covered with melted cheese and baked. Real comfort food.