The Hilltop Monastery

We took an early bus to Dali, a lovely Yunnan town nestled between a placid lake and gentle mountains. It is a famous tourist destination, mostly for its well-preserved historical center. In reality, it is about as genuinely well-preserved as Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A., but it is a decent place to amble nonetheless.

What really struck me about Dali, though, had nothing to do with manicured trees, fake wood panelling and tacky tourist tat: for the first time in China, the sky looked pure. It was nothing like the pure deep blue of tropical atolls – actually it was fully overcast – but for the first time in almost three weeks, it looked and felt like we were surrounded by, well, mostly air and water vapor. I'm not exactly a clean living fanatic, and I do live in the centre of Brussels, where I regularly walk past a government-sponsored "Air Quality Indicator," which nearly always hovers around "mediocre". But if air quality indicators even existed in urban China, they'd be permanently stuck at "Airport Smoking Lounge." After Beijing and Chengdu and the comparatively livable Shanghai, Dali was literally a breath of fresh air.

Our only real goal for the day was to hike a paved path midway up the mountains, going from a small monastery to an even smaller monastery. We managed to completely botch up this seemingly straightforward plan. Ten minutes of explaining and negotiating got us in a shared taxi that dropped us off at entirely the wrong place. By the time we'd made our way back down by taxi and back up again on a chairlift to actually reach the trailhead, the few remaining hours of daylight were woefully inadequate to walk the entire trail. So we settled for exploring in random directions for a couple of hours, eventually splitting off, Glenn and I walking a bit farther along the alley looking for a perfect viewpoint we never found. We got back to the town's centre by a random walk through Dali's suburbs, where fake ornamental wood houses give way to concrete shacks and shops looking like permanent garage sales.

We regrouped in the early evening for dinner at a Tibetan restaurant with shaky WiFi, where we ate and planned the following days. Actually, we mostly drank. We tried every Chinese and Tibetan wines on the menu – some of them are really very good – booked the next day's hotel, tried the most revolting Tibetan tea (flavored with Yak milk) and the best vegetarian dim-sums ever. The whole thing cost very little and provided four hours of good wholesome fun.

Afterwards we groggily walked back to our hotel, took turns crashing the helicopter in various body parts and pieces of furniture, then eventually fell asleep.