China Day 3: The Epic Erhai Lu Bike Ride

After four days of doing almost nothing but sitting and laying (sitting on a big boat for two days in Halong Bay, taking a three hour minibus back to Hanoi, taking an overnight train to the border, sitting in a a nine hour bus ride to Kunming, taking a four hour bus to Dali) I am itching to get up and be active. I take a few hours in the morning to explore the streets of Dali, which is a very chilled out and quaint town. To the west are mountains, which I planned to hike up later on, and to the east a few smaller mountains and Erhai Lu, or Erhai Lake, so-called because it's shaped like an ear. There are plenty of locals that approach you on the street trying to sell you some fancy looking hair clip or a chairlift up the mountain or even asking "You Smoke?" and the fact that they are discretely doing so while in their ethnic dress somehow makes it all the more amusing. One local that I welcome an approach from is a short, very small man who asks if I am interested in learning Tai Chi or Kung Fu. I had seen advertisements for this on some cafes around town and thought Tai Chi might be fun, so I talked to him for a bit and decided to take a lesson before I left Dali. I also found a very cheap plane ticket from Kunming to Beijing, at about $125 with tax and everything -- 70% off the original price. I bought the ticket for the morning of the 13th, planning to spend that afternoon in Beijing and the next at the Great Wall before heading out on the 15th. I wandered around a bit more before meeting up with James back at the hostel.

The two of us rented some bikes and took off towards Erhai Lake, hoping to catch a ferry across and maybe hike up the mountain on the other side. The ferry was going to cost us 70 yuan each, or $10, which was outrageous! We tried to bargain but they wouldn't budge, so we took off on our bikes due north in search of another jetty. It was a great bike ride -- we rode through village after village and were surrounded by locals hard at work in the rice fields. No conical hats here, like in Vietnam, but straw hats nonetheless. We had been riding for about three hours but had stopped quite a few times in villages and meandered around them a bit, taking our chances at finding a path to the lake and hopefully a jetty. After flipping quite a few virtual coins as to where we would ride next we still hadn't seen any sign of another jetty. We found a path that took us directly to the lake so we could look across and sure enough, there wasn't anything in sight. Perhaps around those trees to the north? It's now 6:00 and we've got about two and a half hours left until dark. Our best bet is to turn around and make it back to Dali in a flat two hours, but where's the fun in that? How about a toss of the coin to decide for us. Or screw the coin and just keep riding. So we continued onward.

We press on for another hour or so and finally come around to the other side of the lake. We ride down a bumpy and very wet dirt road where everyone looks us at us with quizzical faces, and I just return a smile. James suggests a shortcut and we ride on a thin footpath directly through a field where workers are harvesting their crops and dumping them into their baskets which they strap to their backs. The footpath is very bumpy, meandering, and quite steep at times and though it's a shorter distance than the road it's not so much shorter on time, but it's a great ride and the fact that it wasn't much shorter doesn't matter at all.

Keep truckin' down the road, by now it's paved, and the sun is starting to set and we have no idea how we're going to get home. As dusk arrives we start thinking about hitching a ride from someone back into town but don't see many prospects. With about twenty minutes before dark we stop someone on the road, who, after spending a few minutes playing charades, communicates to us that he'll charge us 150 yuan to take us back to Dali. 150 yuan!! We are obviously getting ripped off so we say no thanks and head down to a village to search for another person to ask. This time same thing, 150 yuan. James and I consider staying overnight in the village, but for some reason I decide I'd rather make it back to Dali tonight so we finally bargain them down to 120. Still a rather steep price considering we can see Dali from where we are standing and it's not too far at all.

Wait for the guy to call his friend with a van big enough to hold our bikes and they give us each a bottle of water and offer us a seat. Jump in the van and off we go. James sits up front and I doze off periodically in the back. It's a long ride back to Dali and takes us about an hour. James keeps track of the odometer which indicates a 45km (28 miles) drive back into town. We calculate all the meandering through the villages and whatnot and figure we rode somewhere between 50 and 60km that day. We are beat, and we go to sleep in the campsite.