A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I arrived yesterday morning in Dali, a small city that was one of the many former capitals in China, in this case of the Bai empire. After a buffet breakfast and a shower that did much to help me recover from the night train, I headed out to explore the town, a very cute little walled city with all sorts of old Chinese buildings built of stone and mud with tile curving roofs. Most of the shopfronts and homes have gorgeously carved wooden accordion doors and the native crafts in this area are really beautiful. It's going to take a real act of will to avoid shopping.

I actually feel quite at home here. Not due to the Chinese architecture, of course, but because the town of Dali is situated in an agricultural valley next to a big lake, and is surrounded by dry piney mountains, much like my hometown in eastern Washington state. The crops are mostly different, though they do grow apples, and the mountains are quite a bit higher (more than 12,000 feet), but the whole area is very friendly and inviting. The Chinese are very nice too -- not nearly as agressive as the Vietnamese in trying to sell you things, and better drivers, though it would be difficult to find worse.

Though I didn't originally intend to do anything strenuous, I was approached on the street by a non-English speaking girl trying to sell me a ticket on the Cangshan Ropeway, which turned out to be a two-man chairlift that headed up to a Buddhist temple complex high on the mountain. Since I didn't have anything else planned, I decided to go for it, though it felt a bit lazy to take the chairlift rather than walking. I did force the girl to walk with me all the way to the ropeway boarding station so we could confirm that it was a legitimate ticket. I'm so untrusting these days.

All was well on the chair ride, and as I watched people slogging up that steep dusty hill amid buddhist tombs and pine trees I congratulated myself on my laziness. Then disaster struck. No, not that kind of disaster -- no mechanical failures on the lift. But bad enough for me -- my sunglasses flew off in a great gust of wind. My prescription sunglasses, the ones that are also serving as my "extra" glasses if somthing dire shoud happen to my regular ones. It began to look like I was going for a hike after all.

The most efficient way of handling this situation would have been to scope out the temple, then search for the glasses on the walk back down. But I am nothing if not inefficient, particularly when travelling, and I had decided before the glasses-falling-incident that I wanted to do this 11 km hike to another temple, and the path started at the top. So I headed down almost immediately. Of course, I didn't want to start on the treacherously steep dusty slop right under the lift, so I began on the switchback walking and horse trail off to the left. After a while, due to my abysmally weak sense of distance, I decided I needed to cut back toward the liftline. This would be known as "The Shortcut from Hell". I was the first person on it for some time, judging from the four inches of unbroken pine needles on the ground, and let me just give you a tip -- pine needles are slippery. I needn't go into any further detail on my lack of mountain goat-like qualities; suffice it to say that it is fortunate that pine needles also provide a soft landing.

After 25 minutes of this, I emerged -- back onto the nice wide walking and horse trail, which led directly to the spot where I lost the glasses. After a very organized grid search based on the principles I learned from seeing rescues on television, I found them, quite a bit farther away from the lift than I expected. Successful and pleased, I headed back up to the top.

By this time I was a bit wiped out. The elevation is above 9000 feet and I hadn't had any water. So I explored the temple (not too exciting), enjoyed the view, had a lunch made up of rice mixed with a whole lot of mystery vegetables, and chatted with an English guy for an hour.

So now it was 2:15, and I realized that if there was a lot of elevation gain and loss, or if it was a bad trail, I could be hard pressed to complete the 11km before dark. However, since I had hiked back up that mountain I was damned well going to do the hike. Stubbornness is another of my impressive list of virtues. Due to the time crunch, the hike took on the character of a forced march. A beautiful forced march, with waterfalls, gorges, panoramic views, glaciers, green mountains, rocky cliffs, all on a terrific 4-foot wide path made of large flat rocks that must have taken a million man-hours to build. They love big projects here.

As I approched KM 9, I realized I must have misread the guidebook again. What it actually said was that there was an 11 km up and down hike to a temple, from which you could walk down to the road. In my mind, this meant it would be a little over 11 km, but not much. But as I was stillat about 900 feet and the path showed no indications of going downward, the 11 km was beginning to look like much more.

I reached the end of the path, and there was no temple in sight. There was, however, a life-size Chinese chess board being constructed, and a huge new building which housed . . . . . a gondola!!! JGiven how sore my feet were from walking on rock for three hours, and being able to see into the valley just how very very far it was to the road, the gondol was looking very good to me.

So I headed down to talk to the militarily-attired guard, hopeful but not optimistic that he would speak a bit of English. Miraculously, he did, but after he quoted me an outrageously high price for the ride, I asked him to show me the path. I set off again. By this time it was 5:30 so I was setting a brisk pace down the stairs to the bottom of the gorge, when I hear "Lady! Lady!" coming from behind and above me. So I hiked back up, to find that I must have looked sufficiently inept, pitiful or exhausted to inspire the guard to give me a free ride down, which he did while holding a "shhh" finger to his lips, warning me not to mention it to the guys down below.

After the gondola ride, a 30 minute drive to town in a horse-drawn cart, and a long walk (I got lost), I finally arrived home at 7:00 pm. Thank God I didn't have to hike down -- I might still be making my way back to Dali.


Click here for a site showing pictures of Dali.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 2:13 AM