Arose early as usual and packed our day packs for the journey to Dali as we are leaving our cases at our hotel to which we are returning on Friday. Did the trek to the breakfast room and had toast, jam and coffee again. I went outside and took a few photos of the hotel and surroundings before we commenced our bus journey to Dali which was expected to take around 4 - 5 hours. Had one stop on the way and then arrived at a restaurant in Dali for lunch at a little after 1pm. Lunch was quite good and the toilet was a surpise as they were burning incense in it and it smelled nice for a change!! Drove a short distance to our hotel, the Dali Asian Star and what a hotel it is. The foyer area is cast and is an actual atrium which takes up the entier centre of the building with all of the rooms around the perimeter of a hexagon shape and the roof of the atrium was six floors up! After entering through the doors, on turning around the entire wall above the doors is taken up with a gigantic mural of the female buddha (can't remember her name)!! See the photos. The room is lovely and has internet access. The whole place has a nice feel to it and the rooms are finshed off very well with beautiful tiles in the bathroom. Our view is towards the mountains and is spectacular but the weather is overcast and we can just see some patches of snow on the higher slopes. After a brief rest we boarded the bus again for a tour of the Three Pagodas and Chongsheng temple. This a huge place and takes up quite a few hectares. We only visited a small portion of it as it would take days to see the lot: there are temples and whatever all over the place. We boarded a little golf cart like bus which took us straight up to the main Chongsheng temple which is an operational buddhist one, complete with buddhist monk reciting his verses and beating the wooden block in time. It was a really spectacular and beautiful place and the views of the remaining grounds and the Three Pagodas was lovely. We could see as far as Lake Er Hai but the low misty cloud made the view less spectacular than it might have been.

We boarded the little bus again and went back down the very steep hill to the Three Pagodas area. On the way down we noticed that there is a runoff area in case the carts lose their brakes!! VERY reassuring as you would be going a hell of a pace if they failed, as the slope is about 1 in 4 and the straight is around 400 metres long!! I am happy to report that they worked, albeit rather squeakily! The three pagodas themselves are very beautiful as you will see from the photos and we also got some pictures of the local Bai people in their national dress. It is interesting to note that many of the Chinese tourists love to have their pictures taken with us! It must be a real novelty to many of them to see westeners up close! Everywhere we have been since Xi'an we have found this. We walked down to the bus via a little pool where we got some beautiful photos of the pagodas with their reflections and some more pictures of the Bai people.

We then returned to the hotel and after another short respite we went to dinner in the Dali Old Town inside the old 14th century city walls. The bus had to drop us off at the west gate and we walked down to our restaurant, the Yunnan Cafe. A this point we were turned loose to have a look around before returning to the restaurant for dinner at 7pm. This is an absolutley gorgeous place. The little streets remind me of Kathmandu all those years ago with lots of little cafes, restaurants and bars and is obviously a haven for backpackers. English is spoken in almost all shops and restaurants and menus are in english. The lighting was spectacular and I took quite a few photos. After walking for a little while dad and I returned to the restaurant and had a beer sitting outside (it was quite cool but we had ourt coats on) and then we all went inside for dinner which was absolutely excellent! We all thouroughly enjoyed the food and after dinner some people stayed in town and caught a shuttle bus back but we returned to the hotel and sat in the foyer and had a few more drinks with Terry and Jacquie and Jim and Marie. Jim ordered a Chinese whiskey which proved to be something akin to methylated spirits and about the same proof! Needless to say it stayed n the glass. After a nice evening we retired to bed rather late.