Lock Away Your Troubles

We went the Dragon Pool Park where they had a temple with thousands of locks permanently attached to every railing possible. Our new LiJiang guide, Tom, said that it was to lock away their problems. I looked the tradition up on the Internet and got another story – the lock was like a prayer asking for good luck or a favor. Most of the locks were engraved with something. So whatever it meant it was still an interesting ritual and sight.

Dali To LiJiang

Cathy, Jimmy and I climbed into Mr. Mao’s black VW for a 3 hour drive to LiJiang. We took a break at a open market where local people trade and sell their livestock, vegetables, souvenirs, and Buddhist religious necessities, such as prayer flags, incense, candles, and play money (to throw at a funeral). This is where I got some good pictures of the colorful vegetables and seasonings.

LiJiang is an area that has a lot of the Naxi minority. They tend to live in small, all wood houses. The Naxi have their own form of pictograph writing called DongBa (pictured above) that looks a lot like Microsoft Office Screen Beans.

The city, which is over a mile high, has many canals and bridges (350). Almost every street in old town ran next to a canal. The cobble stone streets were very crowded so you had to be careful that you didn’t accidentally walk or were nudged into the many open canals.

Side Note: “IA challenged” (Internet Availability). The hotel was ok but its advertised 24-hour business center was never open. I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is to me! No Internet has a direct ripple effect on this blog. I am starting to realize how dependent I am on the Internet and not just for normal family/friends communication. I email myself with my daily journal experiences and then clean it up a lot for the blogs. One reason is that my handwriting skills have declined as my typing skills have increased. So lack of Internet means I don’t have good notes from LiJiang or Shangri-la. Hopefully you will forgive the lack of information due to my temporary ‘handicap’.

Dali's Main Claim to Fame

The 3 pagodas. The largest was built by the Tang Dynasty over 1200 years ago. The smaller ones were added just 700 years ago and form a symmetrical triangle with the larger one. Recently lots of new temples have been added above the pagodas to honor Buddha and Quan Yin. We cheated and took a tram ride up the mountain, climbed a bunch of stairs and had a great view of the temples, Pagodas, clear lake and mountain. We walked down and went thru most of the temples. They sure used lots of gold leaf! Quan Yin received a large share of the gold leaf. She is sort of the Buddhists version of our Virgin Mary. Quan Yin, The Goddess of Mercy, seemed to be very important in this area, our Dali hotel had a picture of her that was literally 6 stories high on one wall of their lobby. This area also had some of the biggest prayer wheels we had seen (SO FAR). We turned the big prayer wheels, which was the beginning of a temple ritual that we followed throughout the rest of our temple and monastery visits.

Next stop was a walking tour of Old Town and its walled gates and a stop at a tea shop. In Hangzhou, you check the packaging to make sure the tea is from this seasons leaves, in Dali the older the better as in 7-20+ years. They preserve it by pressing it into a mold it so that it resembles, in color and texture, a giant round tobacco plug. It is called Pressed Pu-erh. Most common shape is of an ancient Chinese coin about 6 inches in diameter. But they come in other forms ranging from mini-pumpkins, to huge disks, and calabashes five feet tall. They were very expensive and are a traditional gift to impress your boss.

We rested up at the hotel, which had a nice mountain view, and then caught a leaky (but free) bus back to old town for some retail therapy, massage and dinner. This town is where we started having trouble with suitcase overflow. Silver was very reasonable as well as many other items. On the bus we met a humorous Austrian couple that were taking a video of the leaky roof. They were on a different tour but we ran into them a couple of times in old town, which was strange because the area was large and very crowded.

Side Tour - Chinese Massages

Since Cathy makes a living at giving great massages we decided we would take side tours of as many massage parlors as possible. I knew of a foot massage place in Xiasha so we started our tour here. Here in Xiasha Cynthia introduced me to a great massage establishment. I have lucked out and keep getting a guy named Shaopo (have no idea how to spell it in PinYin but that is how I pronounce it) who is really good. He doesn’t speak English but it doesn’t matter because my feet and legs feel like they belong to a 30 yr old person after he is done. In Kunming our guide and our wanderings did not provide any massage tour opportunities. In Dali Jimmy showed us a massage establishment that is sponsored by the Chinese government. They hire blind or deaf people and train them to be massage therapists. I got a deaf young man that was good but not as good as Shaopo. Cathy thinks she got a kid in training because other workers kept coming up and instructing him.

Since we were in LiJiang 2 days we decided to spurge and we had a foot massage the first day and a full body massage the next day. This was also another China government establishment. My masseuse for both sessions was a very talented blind guy. Cathy, again, got two different girls which were probably still in training because both of them were watching my blind guy very closely and copying his movements.

In Shangri-la we skipped getting a massage because our hotel room was so nasty I wasn’t crazy about using their other hotel services and had not discovered any on our walks in town. We skipped Shanghai but we tried a place we found in Hong Kong. It was our least favorite. A very large roach ran across the floor during our session and most of the time the therapists were watching a Chinese soap opera while they worked on us, so we definitely did not have their undivided attention. Out of all of them we toured, my Xiasha establishment was the cleanest, best and cheapest ($6 USD). But please note that we never paid more than $15 USD for any of the 60 minute or 90 minute massages.

Chinese Minorities

After breaking free of the market we went to a General’s house and a merchants house. They were supposed to be typical of Bai homes. Bai is one of the 56 different nationalities in China. Yunnan Province is famous for having a wide variety of nationalities. The Hun people being the majority in China. If you would like to learn more about the different minorities go to this web site. It provides a very short explanation and picture of each. http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Minorities/China-Nationalities.html

Ok, back to the homes. Both reminded me a little of the Hutong we saw in Beijing. Both were large walled-in squares with 3 houses around a courtyard. No windows were on any of the outside walls just windows on the walls facing the courtyard. The 4th side is just a white wall to reflect the heat. The houses shared an courtyard, a communal kitchen and well. The merchant’s house was bigger and fancier with lots of old paintings on the ceilings and walls.

After our 'tour of homes' I bought something called a Ba Ba from a street venders – they came in two varieties sweet and salty. I of course opted for the sweet one. It was sort of like a hot cinnamon calzone without the cheese of course. Yummy, I tried to buy one in another town but it was cold and not near as good.

On To Dali

Just as Cathy and I had were conquering our jet lag and actually sleeping till 6 am we had to get up at 4:30 for a 5:45 flight departure to Dali. We arrived at 8 and got a new driver, Mr Mao, (YEA!) and a new guide Jimmy. Above is a partial photo of Jimmy chuckling at us – explanation follows.

Our first stop on our Dali tour was a small Village of Xizhou (she-joe). We started with a very slow crawl thru the village market. It was slow because of the women that were trying VERY hard to sell such things as Antique opium containers, (but made of plastic – hummm – I wonder), ceramic beads, old locks, coins, and silver hair thingys. They were packed around us and made it very hard to move – we heard our guide, Jimmy, laughing at the mob and telling them that there were more tourists coming behind us and to let us pass, but they weren’t about to give up a “sure thing” for some unknowns. I had been pegged as the “sure thing” because I bought the first set of beads I saw. (And kept buying until I had acquired the large pile you saw pictured in a previous blog). Ladies kept grabbing Cathy’s long hair and wrapping it around this silver thing they wanted her to buy – she finally gave in and purchased one but hasn’t figured out how to get it to hold up her hair like they did.

Bai Goods or Was That BUY Goods?

Zhoucheng village, our next stop, was where we visited a Bai tie-died cloth factory. The 5 or 6 step process seemed to be very time and labor intensive but the finished products were beautiful. (Which of course we couldn’t resist buying.)

We had lunch in a restaurant located on an old cobble-stoned street in part of Dali where the most of the shops are only open during the Spring when the Burma Jade merchants come thru to sell their jade. Food was good we had spring rolls, meat, rice, watermelon, and fried cheese (what ever kind of cheese it was – it wasn’t as good as the goat cheese). Cathy had to keep taking breaks anytime a group was ‘toured’ pass our table, because she didn’t want them to laugh at her chopstick skills or rather lack of