China Day 4: Bumming Around Dali

Get a good night's sleep before Day 4 begins. Not much happens today and I spend the majority of the morning hunting down "Jimmy," a local guy that takes people into the mountains for a one- to three-day yoga and trekking retreat, exactly what I had been looking for. I never found Jimmy, unfortunately. Today I had hoped to hike up one of the western mountains but somehow never got to it; I'm not really sure why because I really don't remember hardly anything happening today. I wandered around town some more and did some window-shopping, although there aren't really any windows, so I just looked and didn't buy anything. Well, I did buy this little pouch that will come in handy, and it seemed the perfect souvenir from a town such as Dali. I also saw some coins and thought of buying one for myself and one for James, because of course we would need them before we parted ways, but I knew that he would see the same thing and buy them, and what do we need two coins for?

So Day 4 was pretty uneventful and I later told James that I was planning to head to Lijiang tomorrow. I was ready for the Tiger Leaping Gorge. James had picked up a brochure with a map of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail and also a Kawa Karpo trail map, which I had never heard of before but which sounded interesting. We'd have to head straight to Shangri-La to get there which is about twice as far as Lijiang, I think eight hours or so. I was apprehensive of it for quite a while because I knew going there would mean my days at the Tiger Leaping Gorge would be cut short -- that is if everything at Kawa Karpo went according to schedule. But I gave in and we bought tickets to Shangri-La for about $9 or $10.

That night we decided to have a wild night out for our last in Dali, or about as wild as it can get in Dali, which isn't really wild at all. We went to the Bad Monkey again and met some guys from the UK who I think were studying Chinese somewhere, I can't remember exactly. After a few Tsingtaos at the Bad Monkey we headed down the street to the Sun Island Cafe, a real nice bar/restaurant/guest house that we had dinner at the night before. There was a group of people jamming on a bunch of drums and we hoped to find a similar vibe there tonight. Unfortunately the vibe had been there earlier, but the police came because of the noise and broke it up. We stayed for a drink anyways. A few minutes later this Asian Hippie guy walks in, or stumbles rather, from the back of the building. He's got real long hair and is wearing jeans and a plain white tee. He's mumbling all this stuff in Mandarin that nobody can understand. He finds a drum on the floor and picks it up, trying to clip it to his pants but having an infintely difficult time doing so. It takes him quite a while to finally get it attached and when he does he trys to bang on it but doesn't really produce any good sound, just lots of clatter and more mumbling which has now developed into a sort of singing. He stumbles out onto the street and even though the door is closed we can still hear him banging on the drum and singing, until it gets quiet for a while, and then suddenly he stumbles in the door and everything happens all over again. Great people in Dali.