Dali City

Our last stop in China was Dali which like Lijiang is one of the key tourist sights in the area. An old walled city its a great place to wander around and chill out. We really switched off from sight seeing here and just took advantage of the great hostel (with hours of playing ping pong) and found some good local restaurants.

We dragged ourselves away from the ping pong to take a cable car up to a temple in the mountains. It was a really peaceful ride up until they switched on the loud speakers blaring out who knows what in Chinese to anyone within ten miles of the place. At the top we were almost victims of an audacious scam when the monks (yeah right) invited us into the temple to show us some of the rituals. Thereafter they asked for a 200 yuan donation deceitfully exclaiming that everyone had paid such an amount for the temple. 200 yuan being the equivalent of three night accommodation i.e. alot of money and way too much for an incense stick and a prayer, we laughed them off and left a 2 yuan donation instead. This was certainly the most unexpected scam we've come across so far and frankly it really cheesed us off.

We had a drink with one of our ping pong buddies, a Chinese guy, and two people he had met (one also from China and one from Japan). We had a boozy evening sharing stories in English (of course) for which we were most grateful. It turned out the Japanese guy was in China studying Mandarin. When we asked why he said '' in the future everything is about China". Good move because he's probably right.

We decided the next stop for us should feature a sunbed and a cold beer so we booked a flight to Bangkok to avoid a lengthy overland trip via Laos to get there. Beach here we come!