I woke up this morning feeling like crap, and very sensibly skipped breakfast to try to avoid violating the inside of a taxi. We spoke to the concierge about how to organise watching fishing with cormorants, which is one of the things that the local area is famous for, and he said to come back in ten minutes when a driver would be ready to take us there.
We were driven to the lake where the fishing is done, which was in the middle of nowhere and the driver had some trouble finding. We bought tickets - clearly we were well and truly still on the tourist trail - and walked round towards the lake. As we got there a band started playing some music, including a token mentally deficient on the tambourine. There were also some girls dressed in local costume who were singing - I don't think I have seen a more bored bunch of people in my life.
We got into a boat - Lloyd and I were in one boat with a guy who did the rowing and a girl who was there, I think, to look authentic. Authentically something or other. These people seemed to be enjoying their day unlike their colleagues we'd seen earlier. There were a couple of other boats with tourists and another with a couple of guys and maybe a dozen birds.
We rowed to the middle of the lake and the guys grabbed each bird in turn by the neck and released it from some string that it was attached to. The birds then swam around looking for fish. When a bird found a fish all of the birds would gather round it and fight for it. One of the guys would then grab the bird that had the fish in its mouth with a net on a long pole. They would again grab the bird by its neck and wait for it to release the fish, which took a few minutes. Apparently the birds have clips round their necks to stop them following the fish; I couldn't say whether this was the case but the sheer size of the fish should have been enough to preclude this. The whole thing was a very impressive sight.
On the way back to land all the workers were singing and encouraging the tourists to sing too. Somehow we found ourselves teaching the (very friendly) girl in our boat the words to 'Row, row, row the boat.....'. We stopped at an island and took photos with the birds on our arms, which was 10/10 tourist-tastic but it was fun to be so close to such cool creatures.
We had a quick lunch (no eruptions so far) and a kip, before walking into town and hiring some bikes. Some very shoddy bikes built for midgets who don't need the ability to change gear. So Lloyd was fine at least. It was £2 for the day's rental, and we headed along the (very) main straight to the lake. There some great views there and tried to take some good photos with moderate success. There wasn't much going otherwise but it was fun to just ride around exploring. Locals were swimming in the lake, and we found a marijuana plant. Actually it seemed a bit massive to be marijuana but it looked like I thought it should so that will be the party line.
We then cycled away from the lake and towards the mountains to look at Dali's Three Pagodas, some of the oldest buildings in this corner of China. For some reason I was disgusted that they wanted to charge us £15 or so to get in, despite having spent the same at other times looking at utter crap like ethnic minority villages, but for that reason we didn't get so close. We could get good views from outside the immediate area though - they are splendid buildings but once you've seen one Chinese temple/pagoda thing you've seen them all, it turns out.
The heavens then opened. I bought some crap just to get a plastic bag to cover my camera, though amusingly this was the time when the guy tried to give us a thin cloth bag instead of some trusty plastic. We also got some umbrellas and decided to take our bikes back.
Dinner consisted of yak and some yak - yak burger which could be described equally well as "burger", and some yak butter tea which was excellent. Creamy and sour.
On the way back some very young local Chinese kids waved sticks threateningly at us white devils and ran away, which was kind of surreal. And we saw the guy from whose pub we took some glasses last night because we wanted to go home but to still simultaneously drink. He told us not to deny it, so I feigned drunken memory less. We said we'd take them back and he didn't want to kill us anymore.
Another early night, actually.
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