Time out

15th – 25th August 2026

A big part of this year is having some time out from life to pause and reset. But somehow we (or perhaps more accurately, I) have reverted to applying the same go go go approach we take to life back home to the trip. We have been mentally travelling at 100mph regardless of whatever much slower pace we’ve actually been travelling at on the ground. In different countries, a common piece of wisdom which has been relayed to us in slightly different guises has been that of taking it slow, and it has become more and more apparent that it is time for us to attempt to take this advice onboard.

In hindsight, Dali perhaps wasn’t the best choice for somewhere to slow down. Walking through its “ancient city” was an assault on the senses. Our first moments in Dali involved trying to get from the point our bus dropped us off to the other side of a very busy road without the faintest hint of pedestrian priority; cars, buses, scooters, tuktuks all whizzed past the zebra crossing without stopping. Bollards into the ancient town only prevented buggies and wheelchairs from entering. Scooters magically squeezed through, leaving rattled nervous systems in their wake. It was a continuation of the tourist trail and not what Ben remembers it to have been 10ish years ago in the depths of winter.

Our hotel was oddly serene despite the chaos surrounding it in all directions. The pared back rooms were intricately arranged around a central courtyard all of which adopted a carefully selected colour palette of green and white paired with natural materials. We had treated ourselves to a suite with a mezzanine bedroom and deep bathtub to soak our weary limbs. During the day the visual serenity somehow managed to bump along with the constant beeping from cars and scooters on the streets beyond without being too jarring. At night the live music filling the bars – which we found ourselves either too old or too cynical to be out enjoying – was raucous up until the point it stopped promptly at 11pm.

What we may have lacked in calmness we made up for in time: we had five nights to relax in our little haven nestled into the mild carnage of the ancient city. Approximately 33 minutes after arriving at the hotel, we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. So much for rest: we were positively itching to get out and get moving. We spent a morning parading through a neverending temple complex which was weirdly calm despite its many visitors. The following day we took our failure to hail a taxi as a sign we shouldn’t go on a hike up into the mountains which loom over Dali, and ended up at the lake a short distance in the other direction where we were hounded by locals trying, unsuccessfully, to rent us bikes. In the evenings we picked our way through the chaos of the ancient city which ramped up at sundown, and on more than one occasion we found our path completely blocked by scooter jams backing up through the narrow streets.

At somepoint we got better at slowing down and retreated to our hotel to read, eat and generally laze around. Ben sensibly slowed down with long baths. I supplemented these with longish runs – arguably I haven’t quite got the message on slowness just yet, although I will continue to argue that running has the affect of slowing down my thoughts despite what it may do to my body. As with elsewhere in China, we were able to find the quiet places we were seeking between all the destinations we supposedly couldn’t miss but in reality couldn’t get away from fast enough. The band of farmland between the ancient city and the lake, the quiet alleys off the main tourist streets where we drank craft ale from hello kitty pint glasses, a leafy courtyard where we sipped coffee under a pomegranate tree. It was as if two worlds co-existed: the one carefully curated for tourists overlaid with one which felt more calm and real to us, and if you were clever about it you could pass through the second whilst barely touching the first.

We were definitely ready to leave Dali. We’d reached the stage where daytime drinking had become a worthwhile cause, and this fueled a long and unsuccessful quest to obtain the perfect “wonder cat”, a feature of historic architecture now commonly reproduced in local tourist tat to supposedly bring wealth and prosperity. This culminated in us seriously considering the possibility of illegally exporting a ceramic roof tile which a rather demented looking cat stood proudly on. Luckily the shop assistant managed to talk us out of it in fast-paced Chinese.

The next day our train windows quickly became hot to touch as we hurtled south at 197kmph, watching countryside turning to city and back again, with the briefest glimpses of tower blocks topped with fairy tale roofs. By the time we got to Yangshuo it was pitch black, meaning that we had that wonderful experience of waking up the next morning and discovering where we were. Somewhere quite incredible as it turned out. We’d been able to see by the light of numerous strings of lanterns that our guesthouse was a collection of traditional buildings, many with open sides arranged around a series of courtyards. What we hadn’t seen was that the patchwork of old tiled roofs were nestled in amongst several rocky hillocks, vast amounts of greenery spilling down their near sheer edges, resembling giant upturned icecream cones protruding from what would otherwise be an extremely flat landscape. Fat drops of rain fell from the sky as we ate breakfast, and it felt like we could exhale.

Even three weeks after getting off our bikes we were still peeling off alternate layers of tiredness and exhaustion, and this felt like the perfect place to continue to do so. Like everything, it didn’t quite go as planned. After barely a day of seeing how long we could stand walking in the humid heat along the river before the temptation to jump in took over, I was struck down by either food poisoning or a sickness bug of almost biblical proportions, which meant I was unable to stray too far from the confines of our air conditioned room for the remainder of our stay. As a result, we got the good rest we needed, but in hindsight there are much more preferable and consensual ways of doing so. The silver lining was that we spent a lazy afternoon with the owners in a shady courtyard, the 20 year old son asking us an enthusiastic number of questions about our views on China whilst his mum poured us countless cups of tea and proffered various snacks, and I looked on bemusedly trying and failing to get the gist of the Chinese parts of the conversation.

In many ways we found this part of the trip – taking it slow – far harder than any of our experiences on the bikes, something which undoubtedly reveals a little too much about the pair of us. Despite undoubtedly needing a break, without the daily purpose and rhythm of cycling, we have found ourselves a little lost, and with a little too much time to face some home truths about how we have approached cycling, and what this might say about how we approach life beyond cycling. Despite our lack of natural aptitude for taking it slow we are planning to take onboard some of that wisdom of slowness when we do finally get back on our bikes and turn down the tempo on our expectations for ourselves. In the spirit of slowness we will not be doing this just yet; first there is a bike to fix and more cities to see.