Dali: Autumn 2014 (moved from old blog)

 

Mountain climbing(ish) in Dali. 

Having been to Dali many MANY times before, finding new and still enjoyable things so do had become a little bit challenging. One of the things I personally had wanted to try was to go up the mountains, I had come close a few times but was normally stopped by bad weather or a landslide so I just hadn't managed it......until now!

Nat, Jacki, Rose and I had decided on a girls weekend away, before Nat and Jacki left for England, which generally means a hop skip and jump on an overnight train to sunny and chilled out Dali. We do the journey so often that it is a really simple and well timed trip. Off the train at the other end, into a taxi to the hostel, a quick nap and breakfast in the Bad Monkey. Easy!

Monday was spent chilling outside the bar watching the world go by and just generally doing as little as four people can do without turning into statues. Shopping in Dali is great if you want something trinkety and lots of them, but for something a bit different its not so great. Nat and I did all of our Xmas shopping there so we know all of the good places to buy things for rock bottom prices. We blasted between a few select shops and then back to the bar for a well deserved beer. 

On the second day of our trip we had planned to go up the mountain. Information wise we had none; what we did have was a vague general direction (uphill) and a few hours to kill. We started up a road that looked promising, at one point we could see the track that the path and cable car take up the mountain and just used that as a compass point.
It was blisteringly hot and walk up to the start is fairly steep, about half an hour later we arrived hot and very sweaty to the beginning of the cable car up the mountain. We knew it was expensive (for China standards) but nearly £30 for a forty minute car seemed unreasonable. After getting to the top though we felt a little less ripped off as it was really quite impressive. 
The cable car is in two sections, the first took us to the top of the first ridge and the second car took us over a pretty hefty valley and up to the summit. 
At 3900 meters above sea level it was much cooler up there and a welcome break from the stiffing heat of Dali. We spent about half an hour at the top before having to head back down for closing. We jumped in a little tuctuc van thing and bounced back to the bottom of the road and naturally headed to the Bad Monkey and yak steak.