Dali was a relaxing town in Yunnan about a 5 hour train ride from Kunming. The train was the smoothest and fastest train we have been on in our time in Asia so far, and got us to our destination several hours before we thought we would arrive. We had nice people in our train compartment, and 2 even spoke English, so they gave us a few tips and laughed at us while we practiced counting to 10 in Mandarin 🙂

In Dali, we took a bus from the train station to the old town, and walked a few km to our hostel, Dali Five Elements. We got a decent private room for only $12, and dropped off our bags before exploring the old town a bit. It was a lovely area for walking around, and despite there being a number of other tourists around, it was still quite enjoyable. 

We found a hot pot restaurant for dinner, with a single handwritten English menu and a waitress that spoke a few words of English. We were able to make our own dipping sauce from an assortment of sauces and condiments including soy sauce, oyster or hoisin sauce (not 100% sure which), cilantro, green onions, Sichuan peppers, hot oil, red pepper powder, and black pepper. We ordered beef, tofu, cabbage – but we got lotus root, mushrooms, and noodles for the pot and got started. The tofu was really delicious, I am not sure what they do differently to the tofu here but it actually tastes really good and has a bit of a cheese like texture. Everything else was equally good, especially the quick-cooked beef strips 🙂 We probably spent 2 hours eating; even though this doesn’t look like a ridiculous amount of food, it took us forever to cook it all in the hot pot and eat it, and we were pretty full when we were done.

The next day we spent most of the day wandering around town shopping for souvenirs. 

In the evening, we participated in a short dumpling class offered by our hostel. They prepared the dough and stuffing ahead of time, so all we really had to do was roll and stuff the dumplings, and even though we know how to do this part and really just wanted to learn the recipe to make our own at home, we still had a good time. 



One of the girls working at the hostel was from Northern China, where dumplings are more popular, and she showed us the proper way to roll the dough – roll the sides more than the middle, so the middle remains thicker than the sides and doesn’t come apart during steaming. You basically hold the middle and use the edge of the rolling pin to roll the sides of the circle outward.  

Then you fold up the sides, and pinch them together at the top. Ours kept coming out looking like ravioli, so we had to try to push the bottom corners in more to get them to stand on the center of the circle of dough instead of on one side. 

Once the dumplings were done, we could eat all we could handle. They were so delicious that I forgot to take a picture of the finished product! They also made a sauce to go with the dumplings, a somewhat spicy Sichuan style sauce that I am fairly certain we will never be able to replicate. I was able to get one of the girls to write down the ingredients so we could attempt to make these at home. She carefully translated the ingredients for us and left us with a crude recipe, so hopefully it will help guide us in the right direction when we try to make it at home!

In Dali, we also took a day to ride bikes along the large lake near town. We got some crappy bikes from the hostel for 15 yuan each (about $2.50) and rode nearly 55 km in one day! We saw many pretty things along the way, including this nice archway that perfectly frames the Three Pagodas, a religious monument in Dali that we didn’t end up going to.

Workers planting rice.

Pretty park.

Lots of wetlands.

Interesting flowers.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant in the village we never thought we would make it to 🙂 They barely spoke English but were very nice, so we pointed at things in their fridge and they cooked them for us. We pointed to mushrooms and some sort of beef-like meat bits, and we got these two delicious meals. The meat bits were cooked with mint leaves and a soy sauce-based sauce – the mint leaves were delicious, something I never would have thought about cooking with meat! The mushrooms were also very good – simple, cooked with peppers. We never thought we would get such a delicious meal out of pointing at things in the fridge but it worked for us. Another group of travellers came in while we were eating and seemed to be having a much harder time ordering food – they were insistent on getting a plate of mixed veggies, which is not really how veggies are cooked here, and the entire kitchen staff had to come out to try to figure out what to do for them. Should have just gone with the flow! 

On the way back, we stopped for a few minutes to check out the architecture at this nice viewpoint. 

The next day our butts were quite tired from the crrappy bike seats, so we took a rest day and spent most of the day relaxing, and eating. We found a lovely vegetarian buffet restaurant called something like Lovely Lotus Delicious Restaurant run by some Buddhist nuns that is only open for a few hours during lunch and dinner, that was only 20 yuan per person ($3) and SO GOOD! It was one of the easiest meals we had in China and gave us a chance to try a ton of different things we would have never known to order. We had at least 6 different types of tofu and each one was so different from each other, and all were so good. We ended up going two more times because it was so easy, cheap, and good. 

The next day we were going to go for a walk into the mountains but it started raining a ton and I wasn’t feeling super hot, so after starting the walk we turned around, ate lunch, got groceries, and went home instead. After a long nap, we walked to the night market and had a final evening of exploring and eating in town before heading to Lijiang. 

In all, we spent 5 relaxing days in Dali, and were a little sad to leave our lovely new home base. But it was time to explore a new town, so we caught a bus to the train station and headed to the next town on our map, Lijiang!