Is Dali China's Hippie Town? Is It Worth The Hype?

Hello and welcome back to all of you Steemians! Thanks for joining us on our next leg of our hitchhiking journey from Thailand to Europe! In the last post we hitchhiked from Pu'er to Kunming, got picked up by a lovely lady that proceeded in paying everything for us, even a night in a hotel, visited the Yunnan Ethnic Groups Park, slept in a car on the outskirts of a city and visited Kunming's famous park! It was a crazy, intense but incredible few days that we will never forget!

We spent a few extra days in Kunming exploring a little and recovering from the intense past few days by just wandering around, trying out different food and even popping into Carrefour!

In order to get to Dali, we needed to catch a local bus out of the city centre to a point where cars join the motorway heading in the direction we needed to go. As GPS didn't work for us in China we had to guess where we were on the map in order to get off at the right stop! Fortunately the bus drove right past the turn and we jumped off at the next stop!

This turned out to be one of our easiest hitchhiking days in China. Withing a few minutes of putting our bags down by the side of the road a car stopped a few metres behind us! The lovely couple in the car were also heading to Dali! Amazing! Kunming to Dali is about 300 kilomtres so we were really happy that we had one ride going all the way to this famous little town!

As all car trips in China the scenery was really beautiful and we really enjoyed the passing landscapes. However, as mentioned in the previous post it isn't always possible to get good pictures from a moving car but here are a few to give you an idea.

The couple could speak a tiny bit of English which compared to our previous rides was a great improvement and we managed to have a simple conversation. We learnt that they were going to spend the weekend in Dali as it is becoming THE place to visit in Yunnan. They dropped us off in the centre of old Dali and we thanked them for their help and then we set off to find the guest house that we had booked online.

Walking through the old part of town we were really surprised by what we saw! Check out these scooters!

We soon realised that Dali was becoming an incredibly popular place for domestic tourism! We had read old posts about how Dali is a backpackers destination that was really relaxed and not so touristy, but looking around we didn't see that at all. We put our thoughts aside and continued looking for our guest house. The owner told us that there was a rooftop area so we went up to check out the view! It was pretty spectacular!

Later that afternoon we went for a stroll around the town to get a feel for it and spent some time in the local park and checking out the wonderful achitecture of Dali. It really did feel like stepping into another culture but the amount of people there took away some of the magic. It was probably partly our own fault as we were there during some kind of national holiday so it was extra busy!

The following day we decided to make our way down to the lake three kilomtres away from town. The walk down to the lake was quite interesting and we saw the locals planting in the rice paddies. Once we reached the lake it was quite interesting to see the little town that had been built up in the old style.

The lake itself was really beautiful and we walked for a little way to find a nice spot to cook our lunch on our trusty homemade alcohol catstove! Check here to see what we mean: https://steemit.com/travelfeed/@timezonejunkies/getting-visas-for-china-in-laos

After our lunch of instant noodles and Pu'er tea we could see that the skies were changing and that rain was heading down the mountain in our direction so we packed up and started walking back. We got about halfway before the rain started! We put on our rain jackets and soldiered on! This is what turned out to be the start of many days of rain without any respite and also a big drop in temperature!

As we mentioned, we had many days of consistent rain but eventually we couldn't stand it anymore and we went out to brave the cold and wet conditions to explore more of this pretty little town. We were even lucky enough to see a really beautiful photo shoot on one of the towers that are located around the town.

We explored a little more before calling it a night and deciding what we would be doing the next day and where we would be heading next.

We could feel the charm of Dali, it is an amazing place but we felt that some of the magic had been taken away from this mystical place by the hoards of local tourists. Maybe we were just unlucky with the timing and if you come during the week and not during a national holiday this would be an even more incredible place to visit. Whilst in Dali we really wanted to visit the mountains behind as they have really nice walks that you can do but when it is raining it isn't advisable! We need to go back one day to do this!

If you would like to see our vlog on this part of our trip take a look below!

If you have any questions about Dali or our trip please feel free to ask! Have you been there yourself?

If you are interested in our route hitchhiking across the world check out our map on google: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dKeTjIFM0cgSP2Wefp8L3ZvOgTE&usp=sharing

Thanks as always for joining us on our trip and we are looking forward to sharing our next post!

Alex and Malin