Step 30 - Dali... Dali something. Nothing goes with Dali :\

Okay so here is my first draft post written in 'CreaWriter'. It's basically a tool to try and create a distraction-free writing environment. It sits over the top of everything else that's running with a custom background and if desired, custom sound effect (think soothing sounds). If you *must* keep an eye on things happening in the background, you can set it to be transparent, though accessing them can still be a pain... alt-tab lets you get to them, but they're still not 'brought-to-front', so if transparency is disabled, you'll have access to them but not be able to see what you're doing T_T. Anyway it's early days, maybe they'll make it a bit more open minded/flexible.

This post is going to focus almost entirely on the town/city called Dali, located vaguely to the western side of the Yunnan province. I say town, because where I'm staying and where I've spent all my time here is in the 'old city' part of Dali, which is, you guessed it, the older section. Everything's pretty small scale here - it doesn't feel like there's a lot of people. The newer section is the 'modern' part of town, but I don't know that there's actually a lot to see or do there. Certainly not from what I've seen on WikiTravel or the Lonely Planet.

Anyway, Dali is probably best known to the West as the place with 3 big white Pagodas. I hadn't even heard of Dali, but when I saw the picture of the 3 bigguns', I had an instant feeling of recognition. Today (5th of Feb) Byron and I checked out the Pagodas and associated temple buildings, and had a pretty good time. The weather has been perfect, with sunny clear blue skies and almost no clouds (we did start getting some cloud cover this afternoon, but we'll see how that is tomorrow). The entrance fee is relatively expensive (121 yuan, from memory), but getting a good view of the Pagodas and wandering around the rest of the park/complex was quite awesome. Again, the weather made the experience extra nice. There was a special feeling about as I stood in front of a large temple entrance and a strong gust of wind blew through, rustling the leaves of the trees and ringing the various bells hanging off the eaves of the temple. I had been about to take a picture, but it made me pause and put the camera back in my pocket. Feeling the wind blow, the sun shine, the bells tingle and the trees whisper... It made me happy.

On a somewhat less inspiring/feel-good note, the views available of the Dali area from within the park are quite good, though you can probably get ones as good/better from up in the mountains. That's where we'll be going tomorrow, so I guess you'll find out soon enough how the view is from even higher up :D

Speaking of views, I've been having issues with my camera memory card (xD type). The camera is having no issues whatsoever, but the computer is insisting that it needs to format the memory before being able to read from it. The card is formatted as FAT, the OS is Windows 7. Has Windows dropped support for that? I don't know. All I know is that it's a pain in the ass and hopefully one that I'll be able to resolve quickly and easily - WITHOUT losing all my pictures!

We're staying at a hostel called the 'Jade-Emu Hostel', not too surprisingly it's owned by an Australian guy called Dave, who always seems to be hanging around in the courtyard. I've been wondering if there's anything else that he does or if managing the hostel is his sole occupation. The hostel is just off the main road, which itself deserves some comment.

It is quite epic wide, with 3 lanes going each direction. It feels strange to have such a wide road when most of the traffic that I've seen is small tractors/trucks going about 10-20km/h tops, doing local trips. Now that I've thought about it, there are light/passenger vehicles and buses that pass through, but lets just say that traffic isn't heavy.

Back on topic, the hostel is quite nice. Meals and drinks are cheap and reasonably tasty, the room is clean, spacious and comfortable. Most importantly, it appears the hot water system is capable of maintaining a constant supply of piping-hot water. Oh and there's Wi-Fi access everywhere inside the hostel. Basically it's oodles better than the last place we stayed at, The Hump, located in Kunming. They're slightly different situations though... Jade-Emu's location is good, but The Hump is in the centre of Kunming. Like, the very centre, of a big city.

Anyhow, shout outs are due for Byron, who reminded me to comment that he is super-awesome and for Alex. Nope, not the Stock variety. To my friend Alex, I tip my cap. Dick-butts to the very end.

I think that's about all I wanted to comment on for now. For a quick review of how writing this has worked out in CreaWriter, I'd say pretty good. I haven't done *anything* except writing this post, and I haven't felt the need/desire to check other things. I *will* mention though that it doesn't have any sort of spell-check, which I'm quite used to these days and feeling somewhat apprehensive about not having. Still, maybe this will force me to put more effort into both my spelling and my typing. It's quite late now and Byron's actually asleep, so far as I can tell, so I'll wrap it up and lose myself in some good old fashion slumber. Or something like that anyway.

Sorry about the weird-ass order of my posts! I'll get around to writing about everything eventually! Promise!