A fisherman on Erhai Lake shows tourists how his trained cormorants catch fish. Mike Peters / China Daily
There are many getaways in China that promise to be far from the maddening crowd, where the living is easy, laid-back, like the old days. Few deliver a really relaxing experience the way that Dali does.
Some will laugh at that, since this ancient town in Yunnan province is hardly "undiscovered". A Silk Road hub when the area was a separate (Nanzhao) kingdom a few centuries back, by the 1980s Dali had become "the original funky banana-pancake backpacker hangout in Yunnan", the writers of the Lonely Planet guide say. "Loafing here for a couple of weeks was an essential Yunnan experience."
Things have changed－most dramatically because Chinese tourists have also discovered the hippy-dippy old artists' community that Western students have long sought as a rite of passage. But compared with the Disneyland veneer that nearby Lijiang has been given, Dali still has a lot of its old magic.
Yes, the usual Chinese snacks and shops selling Yunnan coffee and pu'er tea have become a little too numerous and repetitive in the charming old town. And gone are the colorfully dressed little old ladies who once openly peddled "Ganja! Ganja!" to tourists－that chorus so weirdly similar to the incessant "Lady bar! Lady bar!" one hears near tourist hangouts in Beijing.
But local snacks and crafts are still plentiful, and even within the well-preserved walls of the old city, visitors easily interact with locals in their daily life.
Get out of the city center and it's even easier to blend into the local color.
The nearby old town of Xizhou, 18 kilometers away, is both a treasure trove of old Bai ethnic architecture and a pastoral escape into the near-countryside.
"It's not on the way anywhere," says Brian Linden, the outgoing American who runs the Linden Centre in Xizhou with his wife, Jeanee. "You can come here and just let yourself be absorbed into the rhythm of the community around you."
If you're a little shy－or language-challenged－the center can be your social launching pad. The Lindens operate a boutique hotel, a culture center and a study-tour education center for American high-school kids in three well-preserved and refurbished homes once inhabited by Bai nobles. The hotel is lovingly furnished with art and antiques with sleekly integrated modern bathrooms.
