Alles hat ein ende nur die Wurst hat zwei...

Nope, ain't gonna start with all ze german now... this is just a funny song and saying in german, all has to have an end only the sausage has two... speaking of two... or three, after two weeks of travelling we all split a little, Vi and I are the last men standing here in Chengdu, Manfred took Manuela to the airport in Shanghai (well they had to fly there, it was about 500 miles away), Monica left, and Vi and I are about to go horseback riding in the mountains... yup, Roger s gonna become a chinese cowboy, yeehaaaw...

So after a good five days in Yangshuo biking through rice patty fields, rock climbing a bit and teaching Manfred his first chinese sentence he could say almost perfectly (san ping pijiu pin de, "three bottles of cold beer please") by constantly having him re-iterate the sentence every time we saw a waitress walk by....


During that time in Yangshuo we all figure out a way to travel together for a good while longer, by slightly adjusting our schedules... and so we all left for Kunming, a bustling city in the highlands of the Yunan province, and a major turnoff point to Lhasa/Tibet. However we were there to hop on a bus headed for Dali, the only other backpacker haven that established itself like Yangshuo a long time ago. Dali, in comparison, is a small town surrounded by big city walls in the pre-tibetan mountains, where one can relax from the otherwise so busy chinese city life.

Three golden pagodas above the roofs of Dali


Climbing the wall of Dali..


During the few days there, we were riding bycicles and reading/relaxing at the very nice backpacker hostel (large wooden building complex with ancient chinese architecture and pirated movies shown every night on a projector, where old and new mix well! ).

After a few days Manfred, Vi and I got restless, while the girls wanted to hang out some more in Dali, so we did an overnight trip to the Tiger Leaping Gorge.... not sure if the smart chinese named this due to some rock formation that looks like a tiger taking a leap, or such that more tourists would come visit the gorge, c'mon, I totally feel cooler now that I have trekked the Tiger Leaping Gorge! Anyhow, the adventure was a hoot, taking a bus out there, staying at the CRAPPIEST hotel in all of china (I swear you do NOT want me to talk about the bathroom situation there), then getting up at 3 am to sneak by the entry gate to save the 7 dollar entry fee, and therefore being there in the middle of the night, taking the wrong (well marked in the daytime) route and basically criss-crossing the valley for hours without ever really finding the right path... ending up at the road ten exhausting hours later and hitching a ride back... hehe, serves the cheap bastards well... but we actually had a lot of fun off the beaten path.....

Vi caught a bit of a surprised gecko...

Back in Dali we immediately took off to Lijian, a UNESCO cultural heritage site with its famous chinese style roofs and narrow cobblestone pathway, one finds himself like in a 40s chinese movie, incredible.

Typical Lijiang pictures, temple-style roofs and cobblestone walkways, with intermitten rivers

There was not much to be done in Lijian other than enjoing the scenery, but we found a hike out to some monestary that was torn down by the Maoists and there encountered a roughly 90 year old man who returned after the distruction and ended up staying there, an interesting trip into the history of china and an unforgettable, eery place.

Yummy, typical lunch noodle soups for about 12 cents...