Christmas Eve: We started drinking about 3 pm, in our hostel, with some fellow Brits – one of whom was a 50-something ex-SAS man with some interesting (to say the least) stories to tell, The hostel, the Jade Emu Guest House, laid on a barbecue; a banquet, the owner is an Ozzie so knows a thing or two about barbecues, there was an argosy of food and a free glass of mulled wine. We sat and ate with about 20 Germans who were in China volunteering. Ze Germans celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve so were all merrilly getting tanked up. We also were pretty tanked up by this point.
The traditional Christmas Eve barbecue.
What happened next is still pretty surreal but I’ll do my best to explain it. It seems it is a local tradition – bear in mind this is a country which doesn’t officially celebrate Christmas – for everybody in the town to purchase cans of aerosol foam and to congregate in the streets with the express aim of spraying eachother in the face. That is until a Westerner walks by, when the aim becomes to spray said Westerner. The air was filled with the cruel laughter of bullies and the sinister clacking of cans being shaken.
She’s smiling, but she’s not happy.
We’d been told that one guy was blinded for 3 days last year as a result of these hijinks, so Amy was terrified. She wrapped her scarf round her face and made me guide her through the crowded streets like a Labrador in a high-vis. This of course just made us more conspicuous and we arrived at the Bad Monkey covered in fake snow.
It just wouldn’t be Christmas without a belly dancer.
Party time at the Bad Monkey! Everyone was enjoying themselves, Chinese and Western alike, until a Chinese girl approached the bar with her whole face covered in blood, screaming. The poor girl had been bottled by a Chinese man for refusing to dance with him. A riot ensued (ah, it was just like being at home). As you might expect, the culprit snuck out pretty fast. But in the confusion an innocent guy was fingered and the unlucky reveller received a triple head-butt…and then it really kicked off. Merry Christmas!
Christmas Day on a rooftop with some of our new pals. A strange Christmas…
Christmas day was tame in comparison. Drinking in the hostel kicked off at midday and dinner at the Bad Monkey wasn’t until 8pm. The dinner was delicious, they had managed to get hold of a turkey and just about every trimming conceivable. But we, like the turkey, were pretty cooked by this point and retired to bed about 11pm.
Christmas dinner.
Boxing day we went on a good old hike up in the Cang Shan mountains to clear out the previous days’ sins. Worked a treat, so we headed back down to the Bad Monkey!
This needs no caption.
And so it is with a heavy heart that we leave not only Dali, where the expats and semi-expats had made us feel so welcome and we’d spent a great Christmas with our fellow Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians and of course Chinese – but China itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of ersatz Chinesery and it’s rank with pollution, and they charge you an entrance fee everywhere (worst Commies ever). But the real China – the old geezers playing chess or mah-jong, or the woman practising Tai Chi in the park, the friendliness of the Chinese and the magnificence of the landscape – is something we’ve fallen in love with. Our one complaint is that we didn’t give ourselves longer.
We fly to India next.