Dali
Yunnan Province, China
June 2018
It rained the entire time we were in pretty Dali, which I think was maybe three or four days but it’s all blurred together in my mind into one endless, soggy experience of clothes never drying, sitting inside steaming buses, walking walking walking in the rain and getting blisters from wet socks inside my only pair of very wet shoes. Dali is a big backpacker chill destination for domestic tourists, and it’s full of teens and twenty-somethings with (fake) flowers in their hair and lots of shops selling drums and rose petal cakes and rose yogurt (both of these are really delicious). The old town is beautiful, but there is a commercial-hippie vibe that feels very manufactured. I think I’d have liked it about a hundred times more if it wasn’t endlessly raining, so I don’t want to be unfair.