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I went from keeping the streets of Kunming safe to some well-deserved R&R at the two old towns, Lijiang and Dali, that help make Yunnan province famous. When the husband of the woman I saved from being robbed offered to help me reserve a plane ticket to LiJiang, I accepted, not knowing that he also intended to buy the ticket for me. When I found out about that it was too late and he insisted on it, refusing to let me pay him.

The first picture above is of some of the locals getting ready to serve the many tourists who crowd this old town. I'm sure these two gals were very happy to get back into their jeans and fashion-ready t-shirts as soon as they got off work.














Mainland China hasn't done much to preserve its history recently. Indeed, seemingly taking its lead from the Europeans who made themselves a little too welcome in China a couple centuries ago, China during the Cultural Revolution worked pretty hard at destroying as much of their culture and history as they could. They did a pretty good job too but with thousands of years of history to obliterate they were bound to miss some spots. Such as LiJiang. Now, like so many Americans who travel from their poorly-designed cities and visit places that were built generations ago on a more human scale, thus making them more inviting to, uh, humans, say, rather than to cars, Chinese people are visiting the 'old towns' in truckloads, now that some of these Chinese people have edged into the middle class and can afford to do so, having managed to catch a few of the droppings from the huge buckets of money that are being made by the raging development that is turning the places where they live into places to leave. As Walker Percy called Atlanta the Los Angelization of the South, I call this the Los Angelization of China. Welcome to LiJiang.


The picture above of small walkways over one of the little streams that ran through town was taken from the rear of the restaurant where I took the photo of the waitress walking in front of that sea of weeping willow tree branches. Good food, good scenery. The gargoyles (?) were part of a tall tower that overlooked the city. There's also a picture of the woods that I walked through as I took what I hoped would turn out to be a shortcut to the tower. It was.








Those lanterns pictured above called to me down a narrow sidestreet and happily turned out to be singing the praises of a little bank of internet access all tucked away in a tiny shop where the young shopowner lived and sold purses and scarves. And lanterns, too, I suppose. There were three computers, each with a little antenna on top, so the connection was slow but it worked. It was a strange thing to see popping up in the middle of this purposefully old town but I'd been needing me some internets so I didn't care. The smiling kids were friends I made when I went around the corner to get something to eat.

I took the next photo when I wandered way off the tourist path into where some of the locals lived. As in so many cities in China, there was not a lot of street lighting. While I was taking this picture a kid saw me and started shouting something like "Westerner taking pictures" which I think was a sort of warning to folks living there that another Westerner was gawking around invading their privacy (though privacy is a vague concept in China or not very well-established so who knows. It did seem to be a warning, though, rather than an invitation).