Expat Travel

Dali - Yi Market and Village

Dali, Yunnan, China

A second day trip offered by Jim through China Minority Travels is to the Muslim Market and Yi Village. The market is held on the 5th, 15th and 25th of the month, with the market being bigger on certain days. Try to plan your trip to do this tour on a market day!

Animals must head to market at the crack of dawn or earlier - horses, water buffalo, cows, pig, goats, sheep and in the food areas - chicken, rabbits, etc. While desultory negotiations can be found, things don't get intense until closer to closing time - 3:30 PM. The unanswered question - how many animals head home market after market with their owners.

As you will have seen from the prior postings, faces captivate us in the markets - these are from my husband's pictures last year. Don't you love the hats? And then there's the endless other commercial activites aimed at supporting life - tobacco, shave and a haircut, new clothes (sewn by the ladies in easter bonnets!) and shoe repair.

Beside the faces, I am forever amazed how much women carry on their backs, long distances. Here's the walking straw!
No story about China is complete without a contrast of the old and new. Here we have the traditional clothing, combined with the back basket - now available in bright plastics rather than the old style rattan on the picture's left, and the plastic toy for the child.

As with the prior day's tour, Jim arranged for lunch - this time in a Muslim restaurant; buried in a village, on a road that probably sees a car once a day. Not a place you would stumble upon, nor likely choose on your own. Amazing amounts of food poured out of the kitchen. Completely different flavors and food varieties, and all delicious. You just didn't want to look too closely. Cynthia, toasting with her tea cup, was none too impressed with the flies or the full volume DVD of the midday call to prayer and sermon. Guess I've been in China too long and took it all as part of the experience. It was yummy and not to be missed.

What could be missed, and was, was the local toilet. Sent down the alley to this, I have to say that I've done basic toilets in all of my travels, but an open field would be far preferable to this "composting" toilet. With roofers laying tiles next door, the combination was enough to send us back down the alley, to a slight bend in the wall. It had clearly served as a backup solution for others and with little road traffic, met the need of a spot of privacy.

Finally, a walk through the fields to a Yi village. The Yi are mountain people, scraping out of a living hours out of Dali. As road construction brings town closer, and satellite dishes bring in the world, how much and how soon will this life change?

On the return to Dali, we had Jim stop to help us understand the coal manufacture. These bricks are used in the home ovens to provide heat and fuel for cooking three times a time. Delivered by bike or wheelbarrow, each family generally uses 3 a day. Coal is brought to the manufacturers, ground, mixed with sand and water and pressed into these briquettes. No OSHA protection in this operation. The men grinding and mixing the coal will be blackened head to toe. According to this man, most die young of black lung.

With much thanks to Henriette for her efficient arrangements, and Jim for his "storytimes", we end our trip to Lijiang and Dali for this year.

Labels: China, China minority travel, Dali, Yi village, Yunnan

posted by Sherry L. Read @ 12:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

Dali - Visiting the Bai Markets and Bai Village

Dali, Yunnan, China

Our trips (both this year's and last) were planned and organize by Henriette and Jim of Jim's Tibetan Hotel, Jim's Peace Hotel and China Minority Travel. Jim (picture on the right) offers a one day tour to the Bai markets, across Erhai Lake and through Bai villages.

The markets offer untold opportunities for people watching. My personal favorites are the lovely faces of the older women and men.

I recalled my mother talking of this as the day they took every known form of transportation, or at least it seemed that way. Starting from the hotel in a car, we added the more interesting horse-cart, open truck and boat to the equation.

Too often, the food on tours caters to the common denominator, resulting in bland westernized flavors. Not so on Jim's tours where he hopes to provide a true taste of local foods. Pictured below was lunch on the boat. A great combination of vegetables (LOVE the chili-ed potatoes), beef and chicken. Fantastic food!














No washing machines for these ladies. If you are lucky, there's a water spigot. If you're not, you're pulling water in a bucket up from a well. In either case, you're washing the clothes in a small plastic basin. I'm still not sure which is better: washing clothes in the field near a water spigot, or washing clothes on a concrete slab but having to hauling up the water?

Near the lake is the dried noodle factory. It looks like laundry hanging on the lines to dry, but take a closer look and you can see the individual noodle strands.

One of the highlights of the visit to the Bai village is meeting the "barefoot doctor". Medical training ceased during the Cultural Revolution, and so medical care was provided then, and continues to be provided in small villages, by self-trained professionals. The doctor in this village ushered us into his concrete floored "ward" and described through gestures (and some words translated by Jim) how he assists in the birthing process. With such checkpoints as the amount of dilation, frequency of contraction, size of stomach, and orientation of the baby, he decides whether this appears to be a normal birth and when it will occur. If soon, the patient stays, an IV is started. Whether the IV contains more than saline (the cure for many ills in China) to increase the rate of contractions is unclear. If the birth looks to be a problem (too early, too big, not rotated), the mother is sent off for the 45 minute bus ride to the hospital in the new city of Dali. Otherwise, should all be fine, Mom and baby will be sent back home (and to the fields) within a few hours of birth.

The debate rages over whether Lijiang is the more interesting town or Dali Old City (certainly not the new concrete Dali!). My family found Lijiang more interesting with its cobblestoned canals, the interesting night scene and Jade Dragon Mountain in the backdrop. The sales people were more aggressive in Dali, and the town less interesting in appearance.

Cynthia and I hit Lijiang with the Chinese tour groups and very cold weather. Dali warmed up and we spent quite a bit of time in the late afternoons and evenings just relaxing in restaurant/bars over a drink (or two) watching the travelers wandering up and down "Foreigner Street".

In any event, both are worth visiting, offering differences in food, shopping and nightlife, and in common, cheap beer!

Labels: China, China minority travel, Dali, Jim's Tibetan Hotel, Yunnan

posted by Sherry L. Read @ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post