Not hippie, but still hip

It has been a magnet for backpackers since the 1980s, but Mike Peters discovers Dali has not lost its special charm.

There are many getaways in China that promise to be far from the maddening crowd, where the living is easy, laid-back, like the old days. Few deliver a really relaxing experience the way that Dali does.

Some will laugh at that, since this ancient town in Yunnan province is hardly "undiscovered". A Silk Road hub when the area was a separate (Nanzhao) kingdom a few centuries back, by the 1980s Dali had become "the original funky banana-pancake backpacker hangout in Yunnan", the writers of the Lonely Planet guide say. "Loafing here for a couple of weeks was an essential Yunnan experience."