Dali

An Indonesian walks into an inn where two Chinese non-locals, an American Banker, a French ex-Mountain Ranger, and a retired Korean are drinking tea. The innkeeper asks, would you like to join for dinner? It will be ready in a few minutes and we’ve made too much.

This isn’t a the set up to a joke. It’s way too familiar to any traveler.

It’s how we keep meeting each other. Random encounters of peoples from all over the world at the same table for drinks and a meal.

This time it’s in Dali. The Old Town is a historical preservation from ancient China. It’s known for the “hippie” culture that isn’t very prevalent in the rest of Mainland. This is pretty apparent as on my first night I end up sitting down with a busking street group and we turn 6 into 20, drinking beers, just on the old cobblestone sidewalk, singing along to popular Chinese songs until 3am.

[There’s money in the guitar case for the beers, but mostly you just scan their QR code and pay their weichat account. Actually, the only physical money in the case is mine. Foreigners have a stupid time trying to join their ubiquitous mobile payment app.]

I stay at little hostel in the Old Town, well recommend on the internet. It’s a weird coincidence that we [the collective hodgepodge above] make it to the place at the same time, building connections over much tea. We constantly refuel the pot with hot water, pouring each other cups of cha, and the stoke the coals of conversations with politics, culture, travel. It’s really the weird collection of cultures and unique viewpoints. We constantly refer to ourselves as damaged lunatics [translation needed]. Two of them are over forty. One was a manufacturer of glass products in Southern China, but has revolted from the system that he was a part of, separating from his wife and kids, traveling to find some meaning other than the working cycle. The other has sold their shares in a start up that made them independently wealthy. After all the hours both have put in, they’ve taken extended leave.

Some day during the stay, the three of us climb the sacred mountain that overlooks the large lake of Dali. Neither have done much hiking though the Korean is a biker by hobby. We take many smoke breaks, up and down, but make reasonable time doing a 10km+, 3-hour trail in about 4 and a half. It’s extremely tiring. We climb around a thousand meters but the views at the top are fantastic. It’s fall, the trees leaves splotch beautiful patches of colors down the mountainside. The lake is stretched out before us, its vast shoreline dotted with towns. We drink from the mountain streams. We pray at abandoned monasteries.

When we finally make it back to the hostel, the Chinese man cooks dinner, a wonderful soup of pork and veg, and a rice stir fry that is a favorite of the local laborers from his home province, Guanxi. I make some simply sautéed greens to even out the meal.

The day before, I had made a steamed fish in soy, ginger, and scallions. The fish was freshly killed in the open air market right next door. I also throw together mapo tofu and more sautéed greens. The Frenchman brought blueberries and dragonfruit. The Chinese guy had a high-quality tea. The Korean does dishes and cleans the gunk from the burners.

We, in our strange collected family, share stories and wisdom and thoughts.

Stories of breaking from the prison of China’s utopian lie. Or breaking from military service that commands you to hold your ground as your friends die in a useless war on the mountain over. Or breaking from the expected route of a college to career to mortgage-two-kids-and-the-car-lease.

Instead. To travel. To search for something.

What’s important, money or time. Sharing cheers in multiple languages and cultures.
Marveling at our similarities, despite our vast differences.
We collect a small family in Yunan.
So it goes.

-

We come together, we leave. I head first to Lijiang, rushed by the arrival of my friend from New York to Hanoi. Vietnam is my next country anyway, and seeing a friend from home is an excellent bonus. I save days by rushing through Lijiang and Kunming and outright ignoring the Leaping Tiger Gorge and Shangri-la.

Saying goodbye is hard. We think about leaving together but for different reasons we separate.

It happens. We swap contact information, but given our differences and distance, we’re probably not coming to family reunion sometime soon. But maybe! Hopefully.

Goodbyes get easier the more you do them. And I leave with happy memories and the opportunity to crash in a remote island in Cambodia if I make my way down.

We only have moments together. Friends come and go and I value them always, in the moment and the crystallization of memory.