Er'Hai Lake, China

Dali is the biggest town around Er'hai Lake, and that is where we first arrived as we moved north from Kunming. It is kind of touristy (mostly Chinese tourists) but has a lot of charm.

It was "interesting" to see the farmers drying their rice, and other goods, in the streets.

There are some neat sites to see in Dali, such as the three Pagodas, which we stayed near.

There is also a massive restored temple and monastery complex in Dali.

One day we rented bikes and rode down to the lake. We got kind of lost, winding through narrow alleys between houses and paths through the fields...

...but when we popped out at the lake we were at a house/dock and the resident fishing family wanted to take us out on their boat to go cormorant fishing.

This is not fishing for cormorants, but rather using trained cormorants to catch fish. We went along and found it to be quite interesting. The fisherman tied a string around the neck of about 10 birds, and loaded them (and us) onto the boat. Once on the water the birds are kicked out of the boat and they begin diving for fish. They can swallow the little ones but the big ones won't go down so they bring them back to the boat. They do a pretty good job, as they know they can't go home until they get some bigger fish. Yunnan province is neat because there are 30 different ethnic groups in the province, many with unique clothing, house styles, and languages.

We had such a good time on bikes the first time that we rented bikes again and set off to circle the lake, spending nights in small villages along the way.

There were a lot of beautiful views, and this was the first time we got into some of the little villages.

Above are some people working the land, and below is a beatiful bridge and an small island with a temple on it that we passed on the ride.

After three days and two nights our behinds were happy to ditch the bikes, and soon we found ourselves up in the mountains adjacent to the lake walking the "Jade Trail."

In the above photo you can see some of the 10km trail, a well built path that hugs the edge of the cliffs. You can see straight up and down for thousands of feet.

The views were really amazing.

And we are happy to report that China remained incident free, for us.