Dali Day 2

Dali Day 2

We decided that we’d rent bikes and explore Dali and some of the surrounding villages and farms that sit along Lake Erhi. This was one of my favorite things I’ve done in China. We rode through narrow streets and farms land from village to village often findings ourselves as the talk of the town with the elderly and children following us around to see what we were doing. Peasants would often take a break from their work in the fields to catch a glimpse of the outsiders and quickly returned to their work as they had little use for us.
Along the roads between the villages sat farm land with individual family plots that were about 15 feet wide and 40 feet long. These families were expected to feed and provide for their families using that much land. This required the farmers to ensure that no matter what their crops were taken care of otherwise their families would not be able to eat. I’ll attach some pictures of what we say in the farms and they really show the variety of the crops and the work the peasants do on a daily basis. Because of the small plots of land there are numerous access paths throughout the farms which would lead from village to village and allowed for us to literally bike our way from farm to farm and village to village.

In one of the villages we came across a mosque where a wedding had just occurred. We asked one of the elders if we could come in and look around and he was more than happy to oblige (they even offered us left over’s from the reception which we declined). Cooper asked one of the elders if he could take a picture with him after a minute of confusion the picture was taken on Cooper’s digital camera and Cooper proceeded to show him the picture. The elder nearly fell off of the bench with excitement over the technology of digital photography and being able to see himself on the LCD screen.
We worked our way through the villages until it was time to return to Dali to catch an overnight bus to TengCheng (not far from the Burma boarder) our next destination and another overnight bus ride.