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 had a fabulous day today in the Dali area, which of course means I don't have much to write. It's always easier to fill the page when I'm alone and things inevitably go awry.

I've teamed up with a couple other solo travelers, and along with a few other people we were taken a couple hours toward the Burmese border by Jim, a Tibetan guy who runs a guesthouse here in Dali. The draw of this day trip was that it would take us to places where no tourists go, and that was certainly the case.

We first visited a lovely Buddhist/Taoist temple with beautiful buildings and one temple structure which housed over 400 weird human-figure colorful statues, all with individual faces and very unusual personal characteristics. We were the only ones there except the old woman caretaker. Before the cultural revolution there were many monks, but they were sent away or arrested. More recently there were six monks taking care of the place, which is used by the nearby village for monthly 3-day religious celebrations. These six village monks apparently decided last summer that they wanted to study martial arts with the Shaolin monks, so they took off and have not yet shared their return date. The old lady and the villagers are holding down the fort until then.

After a further drive through wheat fields, corn fields, and rice paddies surrounded by high green mountains, we arrived at a small town on market day. Having been to the market in Shaping yesterday, I didn't really have high hopes for this one, though I thought at least the native costumes would be different since this area was populated by Yi tribe members rather than Bai tribe. I was wrong -- the two markets couldn't have been more different. Shaping clearly catered to tourists, offering vast amounts of trinkets, textiles and other tourist goods along with the stuff for the locals. This market today clearly had no foreigner in mind. We were the exotic ones, and they were getting on with their daily business of selling and trading produce, meat, baskets, useful items of all types and livestock. The livestock market was perhaps the most interesting, teeming with pigs, cows, horses and water buffalo. And each of the streets entering the market area basically served as a parking lot for horse-drawn carriages -- clearly motor vehicles are secondary in this area.

After a delicious lunch and tea with an old lady in a nearby village (these people are so friendly that if you ask to take their picture they'll invite you in for tea), we headed upward for a short and of course beautiful mountain trek to a remote Yi tribe village and school, at which time we learned a bit of Chinese from our guide. In Chinese, the characters for United States mean "beautiful country". Isn't that nice? I was hoping that some countries would have been given really negative names, like "country of idiots" or "treacherous infidels". Unfortunately, the Chinese who made up the names for the countries were apparently quite diplomatic.

That was pretty much it for my day. See how boring it is when nothing goes wrong? So good day for me, bad day for you.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 6:22 AM