I think I was feeling a bit crabby when I wrote about Dali. Important Life Decisions and the extreme listlessness (make that: Xtreme Listlessness) resulting from two weeks of inactivity have a way of doing that to me. Anyway, with two days on the bike I have de-crabbed myself. Also, beer, altitude, and exhaustion have put me in a blissed-out state. At the moment, my brain is orbiting Neptune.
So let me first say that Dali is a perfectly worthwhile place to visit, slight touristiness notwithstanding. Besides, everything is relative. I’m in Lijiang now, which is Disneyworld to Dali’s Coney Island. More on that later.
More importantly, I want to amend what I said about the Naxi. First of all, the female drug dealers I encountered weren’t Naxi. They were more likely Bai or one of the numerous other ethnic minorities in the Yunnan province, not that anyone reading this cares. More importantly, I think I may have given the impression that the minorities in Dali are all in some sort of marijuana cartel, which is simply not the case. While I did find the female drug dealers in Dali to be incongruous and somewhat depressing, they represented a miniscule percentage of the minorities I ran into.
My conscience is now assuaged. Not that anyone cares.
