Drinking Dali Beer

Aug 23, 9am Yunnan cafe.

A day of biking, a night of hedonism.

My stomach is still doing awful. Farted all night, quite disgusting. I think it was the fish on Catba Island. My stomach just hasn't been the same since. Alas. The price one pays.

This cafe is kind of nice. The sun comes in some big windows, and the tables are big enough to spread your stuff around. One wall is covered with a big shelf of books left by foreigners and now being sold at a higher price. Nice to peruse though. I started in on On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, and thought maybe that I should right the 90s version backpacking around the world.

The food here in the cafes all is catering to the foreign population. Haven't seen anything else except cafes, beyond a few street stalls that is.

Tim and I had a long brunch yesterday morning, and then around noon finally got bikes and road off. Didn't get back to 5 or 6 this evening.

We'd started out on the main road which is nice enough, lined with poplar trees (I think) for a good ways. But traffic sometimes seems a little speedy and reckless to me. Not to mention noisy. Nobody can seem to keep their hands off their horns.

Well anyway, we saw was this big contraption that was cutting a rock. A pump was sliding a big arm back and forth. On the end of the arm was a tray whose bottom was actually 30 or 40 blades. Something, maybe the weight of the arm, was pressing it into the rock as it sawed back and forth. Boulder I should say. Water from two barrels on top of a metal cage flowed down to keep the rock and blades cool. It looked like it would take a good few hours to completely go through.

After that we headed down dirt roads, and lesser travelled roads. We road down towards the lakeside through fields and village after village, exploring little side trails here and there. Little glimpses into courtyards, people making noodles, laying out beans for drying...

Down at the lakeside there were of course a ton of people fishing. Well okay maybe not a ton, but we did witness this big scene, wading out into the water a ways to get a better look ( only later did we read that that was a bad idea as the lake was a haven for shistosomiosis, luckily I had resisted the idea of taking a longer swim). The net was drawn in partly by hand, partly by two big cranks a ways on shore: one a big mill-like wheel pushed around in a cirle, the other on its side. They were draggin for shrimp actually. When the net got close enough to shore, they pulled it into a circle