Dali

Dali (Ancient town) was a bustling tourist town but gave us the chance to put our feet up and rest a few days. We managed a great guesthouse on the outskirts of the town that was away from the frantic hustle and bustle of the town.

The city gate

We took a cooking class with Luxi (runs a company called Rice and Friends) which included a market tour in the morning to get our ingredients and learn some of the local delicacies. She was a great tutor that explained the complexity of Chinese cooking; balancing sweet and salty flavours, use of different oils, careful preparation and the intensely fast cooking procedures. It was great fun and the food we made was delicious - even if our tongues went a little numb when we ate Sichuan pepper.

Cooking up a storm

Fish flavoured eggplant and kung pao chicken

Pressed tofu salad

We had ambitions of getting to the top of Cangshan Mountain and thought we would walk to the gondola to see how much it was to take the lazy way up. Our path there was blocked by a 10 metre high wall so we took a small path around only to end up in the complete wrong place but an entry to the park nonetheless. Easy solution, we'll just take a track over to the gondola. Well we got within 7m of the gondola gate only to be fenced out in all directions. With 2000m of climbing ahead of us now we began our slow trek up the stepped pathway. 100m later we were off track and lost again, this wasn’t going well. Back on track and we slowly made our way towards the Jade Cloud Walkway taking plenty of breaks as Calvin was feeling a little worse for wear. Prospects of reaching the top quickly faded as Calvin's energy diminished and the day grew gloomier with dark clouds covering the tops. The epic hike turned into a wander along main contouring Jade Cloud Walkway to the next chairlift for our ride back down. Nah just kidding, the chairlift was not operating so we walked down some random tracks Kate navigating us back to the bottom and into town. GPS skills redeemed!

Tired and frail