LEAF-go-VSO
Dali
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Dali |
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Our First Chinese New Year We arrived in Dali just in time to be scared out of our wits by fireworks. The Spring Festival is celebrated with night after night of firecrackers, fireworks and minor explosives marketed as family-friendly entertainment. On the eve of the new year we had a celebratory milk shake in the Bamboo Cafe - to become one of our favourite haunts - before beating a hasty retreat to Jim's Tibetan Guesthouse where we were staying. By day Dali was a relaxed, picturesque little town and we spent a happy week here. The highlights were in Long Kan, a nearby village where we stayed with Joy, a Grade III student, her parents and Ha Li (Harry) the scraggy dog.
The Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year in 2006 fell on the 29th January, the first day of the moon's cycle. The event is marked throughout the country by colourful street parades, incense burning, fireworks, dancing & feasting, and family get-togethers. This leads to travel problems in some parts of the country as plane, train and bus tickets become hard to obtain. We managed to avoid the worst of the chaos by turning up in Dali, a fairly remote town in NW Yunnan, on the 28th. Our hotel room was relatively expensive though...
The town was really buzzing, and one of the first things we saw (and heard!) was this colourful dragon being paraded down the street, accompanied by a small band of drum-beaters, pipe-players and bell-ringers. We followed the procession and ended up in a park where the dragon had a rest...and we met the twelve-or-so constituent parts of the dragon's body - smiling women dressed in Bai nationality costumes of white and pink (see picture at top of page). The women seemed as interested in us as we were in them...
As New Year's Eve drew on it became apparent that it was going to be a noisy night! Stalls selling fireworks and strings of firecrackers of all shapes and sizes were everywhere, doing a roaring trade. Some of the bangers looked big enough to be classified as small bombs!
Edie and Freda bought some sparklers and got into the spirit of things. Later, once the girls had gone to bed, enormous explosions and the crackling of firecrackers punctuated the night building up in a crescendo to midnight when the whole town seemed to explode. It became quite dangerous to walk the streets - the Chinese seem to prefer extreme noise to visual display in their choice of pyrotechnics - on a number of occasions our ears were left ringing, not to mention the near misses involving the mini hand-held bazookas!
The next day, New Year's Day, we headed out of town on hired bikes to visit a student of Lesley's who lives in a village on the shores of Erhai Lake, a few miles from Dali. We passed through fields of crops and marvelled at the 4000m Cang Shan mountain range which towers 2000m above Dali. We were invited to stay for lunch, and afterwards the family dressed Lesley and the girls in traditional Bai minority nationality nationality costumes.
The highlight of the day though was witnessing the village New Year show, a series of Bai dances and songs, with the village elder as the guest of honour. We joined the round of spectators to savour 3 generations of women doing traditional dances, as well as musicians and singers. Although exceptionally hot, we had a fabulous time - shading under umbrellas while perching on tiny wooden stools. It was a very different experience from the usual Scottish Hogmanay...and not a sign of snow, wind or rain either!
As well as the cafes and country life, we also visited the local market: baskets, dentists and tobacco traders. We also visited some local temples, sometimes by bike, sometimes by foot.
Another Dali highlight was bumping into Colin, who is working as a VSO volunteer in Gansu Province. We hadn't seen him since the In-Country Training in Xi'an so it was a real treat to catch up on news and chat fluently in English! We had a few little outings together, usually for food, before we headed our separate ways - Colin to find the Great Wall in Gansu and us to find Long Kou village.
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