Washing clothes in Erhai Lake.
While Ali and Edie braved the crowds of San Yue Jie (March festival, according to the lunar calendar) Sue, Freda and I took a local bus to the Bai village of Longkan, on the shores of Erhai Lake. During our fifteen minutes by the lakeside we saw a fisherman catching whitebait, a Bai woman washing her clothes and a younger woman rinsing her vegetables for lunch. A local farmhouse boasted a yardful of healthy-looking chickens and four cormorants, used locally for fishing. Before taking the bus back to the busy old town we paid a brief visit to a temple and dropped off some gifts at the house of an ex-student. Unfortunately her parents were napping so we didn't have the chance to say hello. One of the highlights of the trip for me was the bus journey back as we wound through narrow village lanes that serve this farming community. There's never a shortage of things to look at out the window - fields, market stalls, livestock, women in their brightly-coloured ethnic costumes, goatie-bearded men with long pipes - experiencing this kind of 'normality' in developing, tourist-oriented China is rare and refreshing. Local bus journeys are usually a good place to start.
Sue can't take her eyes off her cake...
Something equally rewarding though not at all 'normal' for us these days was a cappuccino and slice of chocolate in The Sweet Tooth. This cafe came recommended to us by a Canadian three years ago. Unlike many other cafes and shops displaying European-style coffees and cakes, this DOES live up to expectation. What's more, the cafe is part of a project supporting hearing-impaired people in the Dali community...so we decided it would have been unethical not to support it. This was Sue's treat so I couldn't bring myself to look at the cash register when she went to pay - probably the equivalent to two nights' accommodation in the guest house.
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