Year of the Ox

I arrived in Dali about a week ago and stayed here for so long because the Jade Emu is easily the best hostel I've ever stayed at and New Year's travel is impossible. Everyone in China goes home for the holiday and so most of China is traveling and closed the week before and after the holiday. Making sightseeing difficult but allowing for a totally unique Chinese experience.

The beautiful country side. I think the yellow flowers are a type of bean. Most of the industry in the south is agriculture with rice and beans as the main crops.

Bai, the local minority. Identifiable mostly by their brightly colored head scarves.
Bai architecture.
Along the hillside behind the city are several hundred Bai graves. Kind of like small ovens built into the hillside.

Several rivers run down the mountain and one creates seven succesive rock pools. This is the top most one known as Seventh Dragon Maiden.

Along the trail is Phoniex Eye Cave. Which is several defaced shrines and a lookout point. Though it was damaged it was a cool thing. What you can't see in this picture is the straight cliff face drop off to the side. It was a very thrilling but dangerous place.
And here is a view of the Old City Dali from the view point.

So, I left Dali for the nearby mountain of Jizu (Chicken Foot) one of the top five holiest mountains in Asia. Several centuries ago the monk that brought Buddhism to China fought a holy war against an evil warlord on this mountain and died here. Thus there are 40 monasteris and 73 nunneries built along it's slope. We hiked to the top most one, a height of 3100 meters and stayed the night at the summit. It was 5 hours hike of nothing but steps.


The whole mountain was covered in Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags. People hang these flags on mountains so that the wind will carry their prayers up to heaven.
A close up of the pagoda and the main shrine.
The temple was famous for the sunrise, so we got up and did the obligatory holding the sun picture. But it was really pretty.
Chinese New Year's happened on the 26th so the hostel welcomed the year of the Ox with a hot pot. (Boiling soup base that you cook raw meat and vegetables in with a group setting.)
After hot pot we hit the town and ended up celebrating with a Chinese family in their shop. This was pretty much music, hand signals and Bai jo, the local spirits.
And of course fireworks. Firecrackers have been going off all week and the on New Year's Day the air was still for of ash. These are the 3 Pagodas, what Dali is most famous for. They're picturesque but expensive to enter, so I didn't.

I'm just posting this picture because it symbolizes the Communist Party. Funnily enough one of the signs I found out later says "no photos"
This morning I met this guy. He speaks no English but was wearing this shirt.
On another note the plant life in Yunnan is particularly interesting. On one mountain I saw prickly pear cactuses next to a banana tree next to a Camellia plant. But what is interesting is in Yunnan marijuana is really a weed. It is still very illegal to have or smoke but it still grows naturally in people's back yards.