A fisherman on Erhai Lake shows tourists how his trained cormorants catch fish. Mike Peters / China Daily

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."

Things have changed－most dramatically because Chinese tourists have also discovered the hippy-dippy old artists' community that Western students have long sought as a rite of passage. But compared with the Disneyland veneer that nearby Lijiang has been given, Dali still has a lot of its old magic.

Yes, the usual Chinese snacks and shops selling Yunnan coffee and pu'er tea have become a little too numerous and repetitive in the charming old town. And gone are the colorfully dressed little old ladies who once openly peddled "Ganja! Ganja!" to tourists－that chorus so weirdly similar to the incessant "Lady bar! Lady bar!" one hears near tourist hangouts in Beijing.

But local snacks and crafts are still plentiful, and even within the well-preserved walls of the old city, visitors easily interact with locals in their daily life.