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I'd heard great things both about Dali and about our hostel there, The Jade Emu, from Nicole, who'd visited during Spring Festival, but first impressions weren't great. Our bus dropped us off by the side of a highway and we trundled past a line of small, nondescript corner-shops and up into a quiet, grey-ish neighbourhood to find our hostel. The hostel itself was nice, the late lunch we bought there was really good and the boys were happy because it had a pool table... but it did seem to be in the middle of nowhere. This might not have mattered, as we all settled down to chat with other guests and the boys had all bought into a Killer Pool tournament the hostel was hosting, but we girls had decided that we wanted to go out properly, and had gone to all the effort of getting ready for a proper night out, so we left the hostel as it got dark to scout out the area.
As it turned out, five minutes walk down the road and just on the other side of the main road was Dali's old town, which is a little like Lijiang's but less cramped and Toy Town-y. We wandered about for a while, got briefly sucked into a small night market selling jewellery, stocked up on supplies for the next few hours (you might think 'supplies' is code for alcohol, but trust me, it wasn't. The only drink we bought was grape juice, although the bottles did look misleadingly like wine bottles.) Back at the hostel, we joined the crowd around the pool table to cheer on Henry, one of the last competitors left and the eventual runner-up. A second, smaller Killer Pool tournament began immediately after the first ended, but now we and a group of other guests were focussed around a table together, with us teaching the others the game we'd learnt the previous night in Lijiang. Three of the other guests were guys from Iceland, and because we're terrible Europeans and couldn't pronounce their names properly, one of them ended up christened Unicorn for the duration of his stay. The pool game wound down and everyone flooded out of the hostel and into town to a bar we'd heard about called Bad Monkey. This was good fun, although damaging for all of those who experimented with their chilli vodka shots.
On Friday, we hired a mixture of scooters and bikes to go visit the famous Ear Lake - yes, that really is its name. I'd already ridden a scooter when I visited Beth and Cat in Chongren directly after our Hong Kong trip, and as I'd nearly mown down a good few students as Beth taught me to drive around the school campus, I thought it'd be better if I stuck to a normal bicycle for this excursion. Cat, Hannah, Naomi and Nold all opted to rent scooters; Cat was actually pretty good, Hannah and Naomi wobbled off and disappeared within minutes and I was too busy laughing at how ridiculous Nold looked like to notice how he was driving. Once the rest of us were equipped with bikes, we set off in a big, messy convoy through the streets of Dali, sailing through crossings and across another highway at the bottom of town in a big clump. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't very good that day - grey, cool and drizzling - so the lake was something of a disappointment, although I enjoyed the cycle through town and through the fields to reach it. Instead of exploring the lake further, which probably would have been disappointing, we wasted time taking it in turns to drive the scooters around a car park until we were chased off by one of the parking attendants.
This was to be our last full day all together (and we'd already said goodbye to Alex when we left Lijiang), so in the evening we commemorated the occasion with a big banquet meal together, then sat about playing card games together in the hostel. The Icelandic guys from the night before had told us about a crazy bonfire party on the outskirts of town that would be happening that night, but we made our excuses and settled down to a watch a film together instead... A quiet film night really was the plan, until Nold leapt up at the last minute shouting for a party and we all jumped up after him. We followed the Icelandic guys and a group of others who were in search of this bonfire party into town; then through town; then through a series of small dark alleys; then across the highway again; then down a little mud track and right into a small field... all of this took us about an hour, if not more, so by the time we finally arrived, we were pretty keen to begin with the party. The only problem was that there had been a serious case of false advertising. Instead of an enormous bonfire and 500 party-goers, we were met with a tin bucket of fire and about 20 hippies, one of whom was a topless, elderly Chinese man thrusting vigorously over the afore-mentioned tin bucket of fire. It was very, very weird. We had walked a long time to get there though and no-one felt like just walking back, so we did our best to join in and soon enough we were having fun. At one point a man and a woman appeared with flaming shot puts and launched into a professional - and rather risque! routine and later, everyone in the field started taking running leaps across the fire-bucket. All very surreal, but we enjoyed it.
That was our last night in Dali. At 9am the next morning, we got on a bus to Kunming, from where we would all split off in different directions.
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Jo Can't wait for the next instalment of your road trip. I'm in awe of your stamina ( all of you) and I 'm making use of the map and satellite pics below to follow these adventures XX