After a few days we'd had our fill of Dali and decided to move on. I assure you it had absolutely nothing to do with the one English TV station in our hotel room. Ostensibly a news station it appeared to report for three days straight on nothing but China's dramatic victory in the table tennis world championships. Every ten minutes or so the anchor would excitedly inform us, "Just to recap: China has won an incredible FIVE FROM FIVE titles in a clean sweep of the prestigious Table Tennis World zzzzz..." and then we'd be treated to another 9 and a half minutes of highlights before hearing the story again. Made me wish I'd practised more in the garage as a kid.
When the ping-pong mania had subsided we jumped on the "luxury" bus to the next town we wanted to visit: Lijiang. Clouds of flies buzzed thickly above our heads. I can only assume the luxury part referred to the two young bus attendants. One would stalk the aisles like a fly-angel-of-death. Swatter firmly in hand, she would bat ineffectually at any one of the swarm who happened to land nearby. The fly was long gone by the time her slow-moving arm had delicately placed the swatter anywhere near it. Her partner sat beside us in the back row and enthusiastically called out directions, and pretty soon we joined in too. Every now and then the swatting-woman would surprise herself and accidentally stun a fly, which would then spiral down into the lap of the hapless passenger sitting underneath at the time.
Eventually she realised the futility of her quest and slumped down next to me to watch the DVD her partner had just thrown on. A cross between Revenge of the Nerds and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (come on, you can imagine it - a group of nerdy college students in medieval Chinese dress settling each spat with high-flying wire-fighting). It was pure gold and saw us all the way through to Lijiang.
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