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Published: July 13th 2007
We did feel that we had selected a good hotel but were delighted when we got here - the New Era hotel is a cheap 30 yuan taxi ride from the airport (about $4) and is set in the middle of an interesting part of the city - the Yunnan Provincial Museum, the Bird and Flower Market, local mosques, old shopping streets and great pedestrian shopping avenues are all around it.
The Provincial Museum has an excellent collection of bronzes from the ancient kingdoms of this part of China, well presented and actually labelled in English. The admission is cheap, just over a dollar. Nearby is the Bird and Flower Market, a large market which sprawls over several streets. There are not just birds but all sorts of pets for sale - birds, chipmunks, rabbits, turtles, crabs, pups, fish and even big black beetles. Despite the name there were very few flowers, at least the day we were there. There are also a great variety of ethnic or minority groups handicrafts and silverware, many stores selling surplus or knock-off outdoor gear, jewellery stores etc. A great variety of street food vendors sell kebabs, barbeque, roast peanuts, corn and
sweet potatoes (which smell just great), lotus seeds, bananas, fruits, fried tofu and even french fries.
Leading off the main market street there was another street of old traditional two-storey stores with grass growing long on the old tile roofs. Further down this street it is all under redevelopment but, more power to them, they have retained the facades and are only changing the back area. Even ther we saw one being restored in the traditional style with a framework of massive timbers, integrating old carved wooden panels from the original.
The wide streets and plazas of Kunming are full of people and you see some of the ethnic minority groups in their traditional costume and a fair proportion of moslems, identifiable by their head coverings. We found two large mosques close to our hotel and even a Christian church dedicated to "the allies who fell in World War Two".
We arranged a car and driver through the travel agency in our hotel and did one day trip to the Stone Forest Geopark, a UNESCO designated site. It was a two hour drive from the city across the red earth basins, intensively farmed with terraced
fields of rice and corn, with farmers jogging along with carts pulled by small horses or water buffalo. These basins were separated by mountain ranges with some spectacular limestone gorges.
The Stone Forest itself is an incredible maze of limestone pillars, many with huge blocks precariously balanced on the top - this is karst landscape, carved over thousands of years by rainwater dissolving and widening cracks in the limestone, isolating the pillars in between. The landforms are incredibly varied and we spent three hours there, wandering through the paved paths which have been created since the Ming dynasty. We were never bored and only saw a part of it. It is truly one of the geowonders of the world!! I do have to add that there were also thousands of mostly Chinese tourists there, tour guides, children clambering on the rocks, lovers posing for photos, ethnic minorities singing and dancing and drumming for the tourists. We found it fairly easy to avoid them and choose "the road less taken" (often due to narrowness or gradient and so avoided by the group guides) and we enjoyed many very peaceful minutes away from "the maddening crowd".
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chris & maria
non-member comment
fannntastic
Truly an experiance . just wish we where there to.envy I guess. keep sending these blogs, it helps with our mundane lives