They say Yunnan is springtime all year round and certainly when I arrived for my second trip to Dali I was met, on leaving the plane, by a cool breeze and a huge sense of relief. Shanghai is hot and sticky throughout the summer and to be honest, even though it’s a magnificent city it’s a miserable place to be in the summer.
I was met at the airport by my new business associate Terry and whisked up into the mountains. Here I had my own villa with a spectacular view over the old town and the lake. The temperature was around 21 or 22 degrees and I was in heaven. 
The following day, after a bit of business I headed into the old town – I had forgotten how beautiful it was. It was exactly three years to the day that I was last in Dali on my three week exploration of Yunnan. The streets are lined with tourist shops, cafes and restuarants selling cuisine from the many ethnic minorities in Yunnan. However there has been a massive construction project in the last three years and new communities have sprung up in the hills surrounding the lake. All around you, you can hear the drilling and banging which is the defining sound of modern day China.
I quickly found a coffee shop (Bakery 88 is excellent) and hung out there doing a bit of work and working my way through the menu. I sat by the window and looked up from my laptop from time to time to see tourists ambling past (very few foreigners in Dali), some in families and some in tour groups religiously following their flag waving guide.
I managed to resist the temptation to buy anything in Dal except a necklace for £1. There is a huge array of fruit around this area and the streets in the old town and especially around the city gates were full of Dai minority fruit sellers.
Like all tourist places there are locals trying to sell you tours, boat trips, fishing, village trips etc. I decided to return to XiZhou, a local Dai village. I had been before and I loved watching the women doing tie-die in the workshops. I tried to get a local bus but failed. I tried to get a tourist bus but was not willing to wait two hours (the village is 30 mins further up the lake).
In the end I joined to girls from Henan in the taxi they got using DiDi and it cost me nothing. I walked around XiZhou but, although I saw many tie die products, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find the workshop. Nevertheless it was a nice village and I enjoyed walking around it.
Four nights in the mountain villa was enough for me and I headed back to Kunming on the brand new (two weeks old) express train to Kunming to fly back to the hot house which is Shanghai. Yunnnan is a fantastic place which should be explored. Sadly the local governments have taken it upon themselves to rebuild the old houses in all the tourist places, Li Jiang, Dali, XiZhu and Shangrila to name just a few places.
So you never actually know what’s new and what’s old. I fear there is nothing of any age left – it having been renovated to within an inch of its authenticity.
The old town in Shangrila has been completely rebuilt following a fire some years ago and is now fully reconstructed with very little of the original left. In any case, Shangrila is a real let down so if you’re thinking of going to Yunnan you can skip it.