Dali to Lijiang: 181 miles

Five days in Kunming with a kettle and a washing machine had made me soft. It was time to get moving! I wanted to head west, (or as far as the weather would let me), out to the Tibetan plateau and north into Sichuan.

Time for this was tight on my visa, so I took a shortcut by bus to Dali – 500km away.

• 

• 

This was an adventure of its own – requiring me to bargain with a variety of stern-faced drivers in Mandarin before I found one willing to accept my cargo. After hours of waiting, I crammed the bike in in such a rush that I lost a bunch of screws and had to scrabble around this depot in the dark for a good half hour on arrival. Good start!

Dali was once a bohemian hangout, but the city now has a high-speed rail link and marks the beginning of a hugely popular domestic tour circuit up to Lijiang and Shangri-La.

The town centre was a little sterile but just a mile or two down the road, the villages on the shores of Lake Erhai had plenty of soul.

These villages are mostly home to the Bai minority – one of the larger of China’s 50 or so ethnic groups.

Traditional dress, local food and batik handicrafts provide interest for visitors, but they also represent conflicting loyalties for Beijing. Here Chairman Xi towers over the road as a casual man of the people. The party is your friend!

I bought some excellent oranges and pressed on.

It was now New Year’s Eve and I peeled off Lake Erhai at the end of the day, getting a good deal at this glitzy £3 hotel in the hot spring town of Eryuan.

Nothing really happens for NYE in rural China so I just headed out for a quiet meal. A zillion greens to choose from as usual (incredible!), but this was a venue of distinction:

YES – shrink wrapped plates and cutlery (!?)

I soon learned this is a routine gesture of hygiene in all but the cheapest of places. I guess I had only eaten at the cheapest of places.

On the way back I spotted a crowd warming their feet in the spring water, whilst others filled buckets to take home.

I took a photo and went to bed. Happy 2020! 🎊

The new year got off to an inauspicious start as I discovered a broken spoke just metres from the hotel, my first of the trip.

Luckily I am a cycle repair god and was 100% prepared. I took out my labelled spares and did my best to work some magic with my tiny spoke key. I think I was tightening when I should have been loosening and before long the entire wheel was out of joint.

The good news – there seemed to be a couple of bike shops in town. The bad news – both patrons physically backed away in fear when I mentioned the ‘R’ word (repairs!).

Never mind – what the cycle shops lacked in confidence, the passing local Joes made up for in spades. None looked to have any cycle specific experience but each was happy to roll up their sleeves and torture my wheel into a kadeidescope of shapes, before shrugging and walking off, one at a time. Thanks guys.

I really couldn’t ride anywhere now (not in a straight line) so rather embarrassingly I ended up taking the wheel on the bus (!) 70km down the road back to Dali in search of some expertise.

Here I found a genuine cycle god (with a proper spoke key!) who diligently trued the wheel by eye whilst I played fetch the ball with his toddler son (my true calling).

Worth the bus ride and I had time to check out Eryuan too, before another night in the comfort of the gold-doored Oyo Hotel.

A little late – but with straight wheels – I rang in 2020 the next morning with a celebratory breakfast of soy milk, dough sticks and steamed buns before heading into the hills.

The villages soon disappeared and the temperature dropped as I began to climb. The air was thick with pine needles and the odd pockets of snow felt a bit out of place with me still in shorts.

You don’t really feel the cold when climbing, but the descent is a different story. The drop from this peak felt like 30 minutes of ice torture – my punishment from the mountain gods, I guess, for showing up so disrespectfully in summer clothing!

I stopped half way down to resuscitate my hands at this isolated farm, then drank a giant thermos of tea in a small family shop before finally hitting the greenery of the river below.

Rural Yunnan is sparsely populated, but the houses in these old villages always seemed to be on top of each other – often with high walls giving a medieval fortress feel to things. This is probably a throwback to the area’s history as part of the ancient ‘Tea Horse Route’ – a subsidiary of the Silk Road which saw Chinese tea traded west from Yunnan in exchange for strong horses from the tribes of the Steppe. My horse was taking me to Shaxi – a once important rest point along the way.

After a bunch of roadworks I ended up arriving well after dark and in the rain – so the rest was welcome.

The traders have now moved on and the town was quiet but I met a super nice guy from Shanghai who said he’d come to Shaxi to paint watercolours! He spoke a little English and took me into town (despite having already eaten) to help me order some food. We drank hot tea from tiny glasses and talked enthusiastically about the weather forecast which we agreed was spectacularly bad for both painting and riding!

Shaxi is beginning to market itself as a tourist centre but, as it’s nowhere near any main roads, it gets little traffic and has (for now) escaped the ‘beautification’ squads that seem to be face-lifting so many of these places out of existence. I wandered around taking pictures of the crumbly walls in the rain the next morning, said bye to my artist friend and charged up on another double helping of hot soy milk before retuning to the saddle.

It wasn’t so bad riding in the rain and petrol stations along the way were always happy to provide some shelter and top me up with Re Shui – hot water – from their giant flasks when needed.

I was really pleased with the next town I got to – Jianchuan – as it had all the crumbly charm of Shaxi, thrown in with all the purposeful energy and chaos of modern China. I stayed the night (fed by the lady below and her dad).

Then enjoyed bumbling around the market in the morning gloom as shoppers began to get supplies in for Chinese New Year – just a couple of weeks away.

Ever since North Vietnam – it had been totally commonplace to see people in traditional dress. I couldn’t always keep up, but I think these women were also from the Bai minority.

I did as much discreet market cruising as you can with a fully loaded touring bike.

Then was drawn by a familiar billow of steam to a narrow fronted breakfast shop.

The chef was hard at work, cranking out masses of dumplings – spurred on by a patriotic war film on his phone (China vs. Japan – of course). These simple breakfast stops gave me the romantic idea that I was somehow tapping in to the local ryhthym.

For everyone else though, breakfast was a simple matter of fact – trays of dumplings and steamed buns providing important cheap calories for the hefty demands of rural life. Not far from town, for instance, I passed the lady below moving a huge pile of manure from the road down to her crops, loading it by shovel into a giant wicker pack. Backbreaking work and a drudgery that could have been avoided, persumably, with some simple mechanisation.

My ride was a breeze by comparison, but on a grey day like this I always needed a bit more motivation and kept half a mind on the next meal to spur me on. Perhaps a little surprisingly – given what we know of Xinjiang – pretty well every town I passed (of any size) had a Muslim restaurant. This was usually announced by a green sign, dangling lamb carcasses and the odd flourish of Arabic script (where the owners felt bold). These restaurants are relied on by everyone and were as ubiquitous as kebab shops back home.

A big bowl like this would usually be around £1 – with all you can drink tea, included.

I hung around for ages in this particular shop, trying to warm up, then called in at the petrol station next door before tackling one final climb over the ridge toward Lijiang. Petrol stations had always been my friend, but you couldn’t guarantee what you’d find in terms of bathroom facilities. This was a quiet road, so privacy wasn’t an issue, but you wouldn’t want to be caught out here with a crowd.

I say this from experience – having seen one of these places in full swing. ‘Full swing’ in this case means three men squatting side-by-side over each of the three holes. The occasion I’m thinking of was at a coach stop meaning the nine squatters had a giant queue anxiously overseeing proceedings, everyone hoping to get a turn before their bus signalled for departure.

Grim.

Grim was the weather too – just as my artist friend had warned. I could manage a wry smile on the ascent (warm enough). But the full fury of the ice gods rained down once again as I reached today’s peak – with snow, sleet and hail hitting sharp and heavy at 90 degrees to my face the whole way down to Lijiang.

After 30 minutes in ‘survival mode’ on the descent I finally passed a barn, the first bit of shelter in several hours. Here I caved and finally put some trousers on! And a hat…. and a buff… and some more gloves. Better!

I drank what was left of my cold thermos and was soon greeted with a cheery wave from a psychopathic statue of Mao at gates of Lijiang.

In theory Lijiang is a UNESCO world heritage site – in practice it’s a tour group mecca and another experimental exercise along the ‘historic town – shopping mall’ mould. I don’t think anyone at all lives in the old town – so every unit of space is 100% dedicated to grabbing the attention of passers by: chocolate fountains, gem stones, giant dried fungus, traditional medicine, ice creams, tea to take home to grandma.

Quite an abrupt change of scene having been sheltering under a barn an hour earlier!

It was interesting though to see a mass tourist site which was in no way whatsoever geared toward Westerners. And like it or not, I needed to spend a bit of time in the city to get an extension sorted for my visa. Outside the ‘historic’ zone, things were pretty calm and I somehow managed to get this triple room at a £2 per night rate.

I strung up my wet clothes and sheltered under the electric blanket thinking a little more hesitantly now about my grand plans for cycling the Tibetan Plateau in January! The next leg of this journey would take me up to 3000m – enough to chew on for now 🙃