Thanks Dali...

Busy week here in Dali... but overall lovely and restful, it's been great! We're off to Lijiang this morning, looking forward to exploring somewhere new!

What have we done?

We walked down to the lake and back, 13km round trip! Mike's silly idea... started off all nice and pleasant as the kids were both asleep in the pram and the sun was beating down, as we walked through the east gate of the old town, and kept on walking... and walking. It was pleasant enough, as we walked through the rice fields, corn fields, a few patches of mint, lettuces, other greens, and more rice fields, and more corn fields, and then into a village, and more small farming fields. Am absolutely convinced we were the first crazy foreigners with a double decker pram to ever walk through that village. And we didn't even get to a nice, touristy bit of the lake, with boats to hire and ice cream sundaes.

We had one glimpse of the lake, from about 30m, but couldn't easily get down to it. And then started walking back, I was determined to catch a taxi back, but the streets in the village were narrow, and no cars, just the occasional motorbike. In some ways I felt we’d gone back in time because of the slow pace of the village.

Not having had enough walking, the next day we caught a cable car up the Cangshan Mountain. We did a short loop which consisted of loads and loads of steps, but it was beautiful. The coolness of the air in the mountains was refreshing.

There was a large water hole, created by a waterfall, which had the clearest water and the biggest range of colours imaginable. The waterfall wasn’t flowing, so the water was so still, and I think more beautiful than if it had been flowing, due to the silence as well. Jie Jie did really well on this mountain adventure and walked all but the last 10 mins, although in the bath that night, she complained of sore thighs! Didi slept practically the whole walk, in the baby carrier on my back.

We have walked almost everywhere, and we wandered through an animal market, which was pretty sad really seeing all these little animals either tethered or caged, on our way to visit the three pagodas of Chongsheng Temple. The pagodas are visible from a number of locations in Dali, and the temple is so ornately decorated, and the statues of Buddha are amazing.

We’ve visited the Dali Museum, and Jie Jie named all the animals from some rather abstract Ming models of the Chinese Zodiac, and spent a lot of time pretending she was Captain Hook loading a very large cannon. The Chinese tourists were fascinated with her, and fortunately she decided to smile for a few photos and was relatively agreeable. Didi enjoyed exploring the gardens, which had loads of little pockets with walls to climb, and stone lions to chat with.

We’ve had a few quiet days, where we’ve spent the morning just letting the kids play in the courtyard of our hostel. And these days, we’ve been able to just recharge our batteries too.

Our last big trip in Dali was to visit Butterfly Spring. A beautiful park with long paths lined with bamboo, and a large lake filled with fish and duck. The highlight was the Butterfly House, which fascinated Jie Jie and Didi with all the butterflies flying around. What was interesting to me, was how many people just picked the butterflies up and held their wings, quite unlike visiting the Butterfly House in the Melbourne Zoo where they drill into you not to touch the butterflies, and they didn’t even have the double doors to prevent them from escaping. I think this photo says it all!!