.

The city of LiJiang was feeling too Disneyfied and full of row upon row of shops selling trinkets so I pretty soon set about leaving (the outskirts of LiJiang have some mountains which are supposed to be amazing but I was trying to squeeze in a lot in a little and was focusing more on cities at the time). It would finally dawn on me months later while visiting yet another old town that most old towns in China are like this. And that's all right. Who can blame people looking to get by in China's shifting economy for trying to make a little money off of someone's search for the 'authentic', whatever that is. Though I do wish I could have made it to Dali or Lijiang ten years earlier. Or even just five years. People who've seen LiJiang both now and as recently as five years ago say the change is incredible. It really just used to be an old town doing nothing but being an old town. Now it's a Thing. But most of the excitement of China today isn't to be found in the little eddies and backwaters of history that have been embalmed and set aside for tourists. Though of course, if you look carefully there's some great stuff in these old cities. So that's why I pushed on to Dali.

At first, Dali seemed to be more of the same so by the morning of the second day I was ready to go and not ready to "look carefully". But I'd already missed the only quick way out of there that day. So I had an entire extra day forced on me in Dali. It was either that or spend eight hot hours on a bus with a driver who would be tooting the horn at least every fifteen seconds (that's not an exaggeration about the horns... It seems that the only thing you have to know about driving in order to get a license in China is how to toot the horn. They do it All The Time. And nobody anywhere ever pays any attention at all to anybody blowing a horn!). But it was a good day. I'm glad I got stuck.

I rented an old bike with bad flabby tires and worse brakes and rode it to the ferry that takes you across the lake. There was yet another old town on the other side of the lake and I thought I might find what I was looking for there. But I got a late start and I didn't have much time left before the last ferry back to Dali. So, I pedaled like crazy on my wonderfully crappy bike, almost getting blown off the road by construction trucks (a new highway going up there to serve the expected continued droves of tourists, I suppose) and flying down hills past kids driving herds of goats.

I was hustling and sweating and calculating and slowly realizing there was no way I was going to make it to the new old town when I saw this guy fishing on the lake. I dumped my bike right there and decided I wasn't going to the old town. I was going to get this picture.












It's a nice picture but don't romanticize this. These people were very poor. I passed the huts where these fishing people lived, huts made out of sticks and paper and huddled up against the mountain just a few feet from the busy highway. I think this picture captures some sense of their lives. I hope it does.

I made it back to the ferry just in time, sweating like a pig. And then back into town where I came across this shop selling Mao ZeDong memorabilia. After I asked the woman you see in this photo if I could take a picture of her shop she invited me to have dinner with her family that night. They were celebrating their daughter's sixth birthday. That's the daughter in the photo. They lived in a beautiful old courtyard house that you absolutely could romanticize, as I did.



























These are some more photos from the extra day I snatched in Dali.






There are the motorcycles parked outside a construction site and the women inside in helmets and aprons doing heavy construction. There were more than a few women on this construction site. I made myself welcome there and strolled around surprisingly undisturbed until an official-looking man came up to me and pointed proudly to his helmet which said "safety" something on it. I pretended I didn't know what it meant and told him he had a nice hat. There were some good pictures to be had there but I finally behaved like the good tourist and left.

Below are some photos from a shop that made vases. I stumbled across this just outside of town. You can see the rental bike that almost killed me lying in the entrance to the shop. Picked up a vase here for my mom. Later I saw a wall of these vases for sale at the airport in the capital city in Kunming. There they cost more than twice what I paid at the shop. Had fun bargaining with the clerk at the airport just for kicks. Or just for practice. I got pretty good at bargaining after a while, or at least never taking the first price that was offered, though I'm sure I still paid a portion of the unspoken "foreigner's tax."

[NOTE: Click once on "September 2007" under "Archives" at the top of this blog and to the left to see the rest of the 'travelogue' that follows below (the last entry is called "Class photo, last day").]



















[NOTE: Click once on "September 2007" under "Archives" at the top of this blog and to the left to see the rest of the 'travelogue' that follows below (the last entry is called "Class photo, last day").]