Dali was a great town. Given that the author of the old Lonely Planet that we refer to suggests that Lijiang is the must see tourist mecca, and is a better experience than Dali we were obviously keen to make it up to the road to see our new home for the next few days.

Lijiang isn’t much chop.

The beauty of this old town with its canals, stone bridges and cobble stones is apparent immediately, and the small shops selling ponchos, scarves, stone combs, and bars on the river give the town a big tick on first glance. But within half an hour of walking through the town to find an inn for the night soon revealed that every street is the same and every shop is the same. Couple this with exorbitant prices (back to AU$7 coffee and AU$7 beer) and the town soon loses its appeal.

To get to Lijiang we left Dali having bought 45 Yuan bus tickets from a travel agent on Foreigner Street, just opposite our pad, the Koreana Guesthouse. The three and a half hour journey was spent reading The Great Gatsby and glancing both at the Kung-Fu movie playing and the beautiful scenery that was unfurling in front of our eyes. It took the delusional charm of Gatsby to stop me from putting the book down and looking out the window; as an old Adelaide resident it was a drive for a couple of hundred kilometres on a road not so different from the Gorge Road, but with peaks soaring above 4000m. Unlike my drives up the gorge though, this time I was in an ‘express bus.’ I learned on this journey that express is a euphemism for mad, and spent much of the drive on the wrong side of the road with oncoming traffic yielding wildly to make way for the Lijiang Express.

The combination of crazy driving, strange kung-fu, and trying to keep up with Tom, Gatsby, Nick and Daisy was complemented nicely with what will be our last great Baba from Dali. How a piece of bread can be combined so neatly with spring onion and salt is beyond me, and I have since learned that it is also beyond the culinary skills of the cooks in Lijiang. If you do find yourself in Dali head up People’s Street and grab a Baba from the street vendor opposite Gogo Cafe, you’ll be doing your tastebuds a tremendous favour.

We have had some success in Lijiang to obtain good food and liquid to wash it down with and all at the right prices. Chinese Pizza is a good little treat, and though tastier than whatever the local pizza shop is whipping up it is 4 Yuan rather than 50. Head East down Wuyi Street and just after the right down the steps to Zhenxing Alley you’ll see a small shop front with a few tables in it. Sit down and enjoy the pizza and the complimentary Chinese Omelet. Unlike an Italian pizza the Chinese variety was more bread like with stuffing, and may have more in common with the Lebanese offerings of bread with zatar or spinach, but it was great and cheap in a town where both are difficult to come across. After our pizza we washed it down with beer in an unmarked cafe come bar on Zhenxing Alley (head back from the pizza shop and take the next left down the steps.) The place with no name is on the left hand side at the end of the street before it takes a hard right – I’d say you can’t miss it, but you probably can! Sit down and have 3.50 Yuan beers and relax away from the bustling tourists.

How a bar makes a profit by selling beers at a tenth of the price as the bars on the river just a few hundred metres away is beyond me, but perhaps I underestimate the laziness or nervousness of some tourists to go for walk away from the centre of town. Whatever it is though it must be paying off handsomely for the bar and restaurant owners on the river that must truly flow with gold.

Having spent a day and half in Lijiang I am still completely uninspired by the town and we’re heading off tomorrow via bus to Shangri-La, another few hundred kilometres north and a few hundred metres higher in altitude. More or less the end of Yunnan province before the borders of Tibet and Sichuan meet we hope that Shangri-La will provide an experience closer to what we enjoyed in Dali rather than Lijiang.

On reflection from what was said by travellers and guidebooks it’s actually hard to even see how Dali and Lijiang are compared to one another. Dali has trumps on the scenery, the food, the bars, but more than that, it’s a genuine town with real people living in real houses. Kids playing in the street and locals mixing with tourists in dumpling restaurants in Dali is as foreign in Lijiang as the KFC near the water-wheel here is a world away from Dali.

We’ll have to spend a minimum of 5 days in Shangri-La to allow time for our Tibet Permit to be approved, so in that time we hope to do some exploring of the province and meander back this way to Tiger Leaping Gorge for some trekking and horse riding. Well, we’ll see on the latter.

Cheers for your emails while I’ve been away; always great to keep up with what everyone is up to.

Jamie