Dali

On Tuesday I flew from Shenzhen to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. I took a taxi to the bus station and hopped on a five-hour charter bus to Dali. "Dali" on bus tickets, though, is actually a larger city about twenty minutes south of the old town. From the bus station I had to find my way to a certain intersection to catch a local bus. It took me two hours of wandering around "Dali" to find it.

It's as difficult to get around without speaking Chinese as it is to talk politics with a newborn. So far I've managed by painstakingly comparing the characters in my guidebook with street signs (there's a little box in this caracter, three lines in that character, a tent-like triangle in another, etc.). Sometimes I find someone literate, willing to help, good enough with maps, and able to pantomine directions to help read the maps in Lonely Planet for me. I really need to learn Mandarin Chinese.

Yesterday I rented a bike for $1.50 and biked about 40 miles/65 kilometers with a friend I met at the guesthouse, YuTing. She's a native Chinese speaker but is doing a PhD in Nebraska, hence us being able to communicate. She wanted a friend to bike with and I needed someone to help order food. Perfect.

We ran into China's famous "Old Woman Biker" while on the trail. She's 63 and her friend is 60. They've been biking around China for three years. How coincidental!

Er Hai Lake, China's seventh largest lake. Dali sits on its southwest shore. I biked halfway around it.

It turns out that Blogger is blocked in China except on my American friends' computers who configured their internet with an American VSP. I tried typing in the url to this page and the computer completely freaked out - everything on the desktop started flashing on and off, the mouse moved all by itself, and the computer eventually shut off. Talk about censorship. How did I work around this? I emailed the blog my entry. Hopefully this works because I won't see it for a few weeks.