We love Dali. We like the artist, but we love the city in Yunnan. After a couple days here we’re seriously thinking of this as a place to spend a month in a year or two so Mark can study Chinese. A city of about 83,000 people some 150 miles northwest of Kunming, it’s a stunning place. Years ago it was the original Western backpacker hangout in Yunnan but maybe 10 or 15 years ago Chinese tourists discovered it; these days there are a lot of Chinese tourists here.

I continue to be amazed at the results of the economic boom in China. Think of it this way: If just 10 percent of Chinese moved into the middle class over the last decade – a number I’m just making up, but not implausible – that’s 150 million new middle class people who can afford to travel domestically, at least, if not internationally. And that’s what you see in places like Dali and even Jianshui and Xinjie, lots and lots and lots of middle class Chinese starting to explore the world. The implications for the future, unless the Chinese economy collapses, are jaw-dropping. Of course, if the Chinese economy does collapse then all bets are off everywhere.

There’s a good reason it’s so popular. It sits between Erhai Lake on one side and the Yun mountains on the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau. At about 6,700 feet elevation, the climate is a little colder than Kunming but still glorious here in mid-March at least. It was raining when we first got here and overcast our first full day, but then our second morning was beautifully clear and crisp. For the first time we saw the snow-capped mountains behind the town and now it was true love.

Getting there was hell. Staff at the Sofitel said they’d arrange for a taxi at 9:00 AM to take us to the train station; they made a big deal the night before making sure which station we were supposed to go to as there are now two stations in Kunming. Come 9 o’clock and we’ve checked out of the hotel, but no taxi. Something got messed up so – in the rain – they had to get another. A little late, then, we climb into the taxi and the concierge tells the driver where to go.

Except he told him the wrong station, which we figured out 20 minutes into what was supposed to be a 10-minute ride. He then turned around but by then it was too late; we were going to miss our train. And unfortunately the next two trains to Dali had only third-class seats available compared to the “soft sleeper” seats we’d reserved. And it would take 30 minutes longer, presumably because it would make more stops. Ugh.

Ultimately it wasn’t that bad. Our assigned seats were pretty bad in a crowded, loud, and slightly smelly car. Shortly after leaving, though, I took a walk through the train and discovered a car that was nearly empty and – a particular blessing – the speaker at one end wasn’t working. So most of the long trip I was blissfully alone, stretched out on a third-class mattress, with only the faint noise of too-loud music at the other end of the car.

Once we got settled, though, we discovered a colorful, vibrant city. With nightlife. Serious nightlife. One stretch we walked along the first night had live music at pretty much every door. Live music just BLASTING out onto the street, often what sounded like bad music blasting out. We haven’t been back down that street.

But other streets are nearly as lively; I’m not sure I’ve ever been in any town with more live music at night. Just dozens of places to stop for a drink and the opportunity to breathe in massive amounts of second-hand smoke. We even found one restaurant that reached nearly Western standards in terms of decor and atmosphere, with French wine and everything.

So besides eating and drinking and listening to music what is there to do in Dali? Part of the joy here is just walking around and watching all the Chinese tourists and admiring the beautiful architecture. Beyond that, the biggest tourist attraction is the Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple just a mile or so out of town.

We started our tour having been warned that the $18 tickets seemed a little high compared to other costs in Yunnan. And thinking the main attraction was the three pagodas for which the site is named, it did seem kind of steep. The tallest of the three stands at 227 feet and dates from the ninth century AD; during repair work in the 1970s they discovered copper plates describing specific repairs undertaken in 1000, 1142, and 1145. So yeah, it’s pretty old. Mark in particular was enamored of the beauty of the pagodas.

After we’d admired all that for a while, we saw that there were other buildings behind the pagodas, heading up the foothills that led into the mountains. So we started climbing up. And each time we got to one of the big, gorgeous buildings we’d see there was another further up the hill, behind it. And another, and another. The genius of the design was that you never saw more than the next building. And then there was another, each of the them somewhat different but all of them beautiful. We ended up spending way more time there than we’d expected and I found myself wishing we could come back in a couple weeks to see it all deeper into spring. We’ll just have to wait a year or two.

The other highlight was the town of Xizhou, 11 miles north of Dali right on Erhai Lake. A fun British couple we met back in Jianshui and who were traveling pretty much along the same route as us, Derrick & Irene, had gone up there a day or two before we did and told us about the biking and a great hotel/restaurant for lunch. So off we went, sharing a taxi with a French couple who we met while waiting for a bus. (We’ve had great fun here in Yunnan meeting other interesting Occidental tourists.)

After mistakenly wasting nearly $20 on tickets for a tour of some historic buildings that we thought was an entry price for the town itself – we rarely make dumb mistakes like that – we found a place to rent bikes and off we went. The lake itself is pretty and it was fun just riding through some tiny little villages. The unique part of the ride, though, is that the primary crop of the area is … garlic. So you’re riding along, the lake on one side and untold acre after acre of garlic fields. The smell was really something, not overpowering but a distinct onion/garlic smell through the whole area. Cool.

And then lunch at the Linden Center, a boutique hotel and cultural exchange center founded by an American Sanford PhD guy who’s obviously in love with Chinese culture and art. According to Wikipedia, the American couple who own the property are “the only foreigners to have possession of a nationally protected heritage site in China.” The building itself is not unlike the Silver Chest hotel we stayed at in Kunming, a classic Chinese building with rooms arrayed around multiple courtyards. As this property, though, is on the edge of town, the sun terrace has great views of the garlic fields and mountains and all that.

Lunch there itself was fantastic. The cuisine in this area makes intense use of both local mushrooms and, interestingly, local flowers. So one of our dishes had, if you can believe it, pomegranate flowers and another some great fresh, seasonal ferns. Delightful.

So there you have Dali – more nightlife than anywhere except notorious Bangkok than we’ve seen in months, color, excitement, and great food. Definitely a place we’d come back to for a longer stay. Still 10 days to go in Yunnan and so far we’re loving it.

From Jianshui it was another three-and-a-half or four-hour bus ride further south to Xinjie; by now we were starting to get close to the Vietnam border. The reason to come all the way down here is that the rice terraces are supposed to be beautiful and – after an initial fear that because of the fog we wouldn’t see a thing – we discovered that yes, they’re beautiful.

There’s only one bus daily from Jianshui direct to Xinjie – quite a small little town, much more “real china” than nearly anything we’ve seen before – and that bus didn’t get us into town until mid-afternoon. When we got in, the town was just socked in by fog, as thick as anything we’ve seen in many years. Not an auspicious start to a little side trip where you’re supposed to be awed by nature and how humans have made their environment work for them.

Still, before sunset, we had a chance to walk around a little to discover a nice little farmers market in town where they sell some of that local produce that makes the food here so great. Beautiful and atmospheric on a 50-degree foggy afternoon.

Dinner choices in Xinjie are really, really limited, at least for fussy Western tourists. OK, we’re not very fussy, but still just not many restaurants at all. Our hotel had a huge, bright restaurant that seemed primarily for the groups of Chinese being bussed in on package tours. Mark went in to ask about a menu and it seemed they didn’t even have one; they just feed the big groups whatever they have. (We later spoke with a British couple who did eat there, but even with a menu it’s not the sort of place we would have wanted to go.)

Instead, we found something approaching heaven. A tiny local place right off Xinjie’s main square, specializing in Sichuan food. Now, I say “approaching” heaven, because, well, it’s not the sort of place we would ever go into normally. Tiny – five tables, I think – and filled with smoke from the other patrons. And when Chinese eat, they just toss any refuse – napkins, plastic dish covers, perhaps even bits of food – onto the floor.

The food, though, made up for it, and the couple running it were just so sweet. It even had an English menu so we could see all the variety of bowels, guts, and similarly unappealing items on offer. There were other great choices, though, so we had dinner, lunch, and dinner again their on our brief stay in Xinjie.

We’d arranged with a driver for the next day and, at the suggestion of the local expert, were scheduled to leave for our tour of the rice terraces at noon when the weather might be getting better. So after breakfast Mark & I just headed off on our own on some country road and, since it only took maybe five minutes to walk out of town, had our own private tour of rural China. The fog was lifting, the temperature was in the upper 50s, we had views of rice terraces in the distance, it felt like spring, and it was just about perfect. If we saw nothing else in Xinjie, if the fog obscured our views of the rice terraces we were supposed to see as tourists, this was pretty good.

But indeed, it got better. A lot better. The fog had indeed lifted, our driver picked us up, we drove maybe 15 minutes, and quickly we were in places where you could pull over and look down the valleys and hills to these amazing rice terraces. Interestingly, there was no rice; it’s harvested here in the fall and not planted again for a month or two. But the water fills them up and the sunlight reflecting can be stunning. Just amazing what humans can do to grow food on steep hills.

At one point we stopped so the driver could drop off some produce at a small inn and when he came back he brought with him a French couple and a Belgian woman whose primary language was also French. They were asking for information about how to get out to tour the rice terraces and, well, eventually they just joined us. They spoke very little English, so Mark spent the afternoon conversing with them in nearly fluent French, when not picking through his much more-limited Chinese with the driver. (At one point, before they’d joined us, we heard one of the French women say to the others about Mark, in French, “His French is really quite good.” Cool!)

And so we drove and stopped for pictures and drove and took more pictures and drove some more. We’d told the woman with whom we’d set up this tour that we wanted to hike, and the driver – in his very limited English – kept indicating that we would, but it didn’t seem as though it was happening. We drove and stopped and drove and stopped. By 4:00 PM I’d pretty much given up hope and was just enjoying the day for what it was. Finally, though, he parked and then we just headed down through some of the rice fields. At first it was a paved little path, but eventually that gave way to a path. It ended up being a beautiful one-hour hike up and down, all on our own, through the great Chinese countryside. That was heaven. At the end of the trail we bade adieu to the French, who were going to stay at the little town we ended at to watch sunset. The driver took us up to the road, waved down a passing minivan, and had him drop us at our car. Kind of a perfect afternoon.

It’s a good thing it was a perfect afternoon, because the price was an eight-hour bus ride back up to Kunming, where we were spending the night before heading west to our next destination, Dali. The only upside was that, knowing the bus ride was going to be pretty crappy, we’d reserved a room at the Sofitel in Kunming. A little luxury – cheap by typical Western standards, but still a splurge – after a day like that would be something to look forward to.

And thus you get a sense of how weird our lives can be. We start the day at a comfortable but strange Chinese hotel in Xanjie where they lay white sheets on the carpet to keep in from getting soiled:

Then we ride a bus where the bathroom stops are like this:

And end up in a suite at the Sofitel (this will be our last year with Platinum status in the Accor chain) where the bathroom looks like this:

And breakfast as we were getting ready to leave may have been the best spread we’ve had in nearly four years of travel. Obviously, life is good.

From here it’s a seven-hour train ride west to Dali as we work our way toward the Leaping Tiger Gorge and Shangri La.

A couple years ago when traveling in China we went to a small town to see what life was like off the beaten track. It was … OK … but there really wasn’t much to do or see; we realized that three days was just too much. So for this stop off the beaten path we kept it to two nights and that felt just about right.

Jianshui is a “little” town of about half a million people about 120 miles south of Kunming, still in Yunnan Province. It takes fully three-and-a-half hours to travel that distance on a rickety old bus that, fortunately, was only about half full. It was mostly a reasonably pleasant ride: the weather was pleasant, a couple windows were partly open, no one was smoking, and there was neither loud music nor loud smash-up movies playing. Just a good opportunity to read and watch rural China go by.

Once here, Jianshui has a beautiful old town with all sorts of classic Chinese city gates and old buildings and all that picturesque stuff. There are three primary tourist attractions, all of which you can see in one day.

• The Jianshui Confucius Temple dates from the 13th century and is one of the oldest and largest Confucian temples in China; it was historically the most important school in Yunnan. It covers almost 20 acres and has a wide variety of halls, houses, palaces, garrets, gates, pavilions, temples, archways, and all that kind of stuff. The artificial pond around which it sits is so big it uses the word “sea” in the name, the Sea of Study; locals claim it is the largest “of its kind” in all of China, but that qualifier can mean a lot of things. Either way, the temple grounds were wonderfully photogenic and great to walk around.

• The Zhu Family Garden was another highlight in Jianshui. Built by a wealthy merchant family in the late 19th century, the gardens themselves were closed for renovation, but the family lodgings themselves were more than impressive enough to justify the visit. The dwelling area takes up about 54,000 square feet, including 42 courtyards and 214 separate buildings. Not bad living quarters if you can afford it.

• Finally, the Twin Dragon Bridge was a real highlight. Dating from the Ming Dynasty (which everyone, of course, knows ruled from the 14th to the 17th centuries), it is one of the oldest bridges still standing in China. We were there during a light rain that would start and stop and start and stop, making the 17-arch structure particularly beautiful.

Beyond those tourist stops, Jianshui had all the pieces that we love about China and that make it challenging. English is very limited here, even at our hotel. Thank God Mark has been studying Chinese; it would be really hard to travel without his rudimentary skills, though Google Translate helps, too. The food is mostly good, but it’s little short of stunning how few restaurants there are. You go out at night and all the clothing shops and cell phone stores and all that are open until 9:00 or later, but try to find a restaurant anywhere. As Mark pointed out, the ratio of restaurant-to-commercial here must be about the smallest in the world!

One restaurant we found after a fair amount of searching – Google Maps had it in the wrong place – was pretty good, and most importantly had an English-translated menu. The first night was pretty good, and with a bottle of local wine came to all of $18 total. So we went back the next night and were shocked to find it absolutely packed. It seemed as though they were not going to have room for us at all, which would have been something of a disaster; we hadn’t seen any other restaurants with English menus, and by then – about 8:00 PM – anything else would have been closing down by the time we found it.

Fortunately, not only did they find us a table, it was a beautiful spot out on the second-floor balcony. As we walked through the dining room I was stunned both by how much smoke there was and by how much trash there was. The Chinese just toss napkins and plastic and trash on the floor while they’re eating and when they leave … what a mess! For us, though, out on the balcony with the old town street below us and fresh air around us, it was heavenly. And, with this meal coming in at about $23 since we’d ordered an extra dish to sample, reasonably affordable.

From here we catch a late-morning bus another three hours south to the Yuanyang Rice Terraces before we head back to Kunming and then off to see more of Yunnan.