After deciding to stay on the bus at Tiger Leaping Gorge we continued to drive through to Lijiang which added another two hours onto our day. We had visited Lijiang in 2005 so was familiar with the general layout of the city. It was however, like all Chinese cities we had previously visited, so much larger than we remembered. Lijiang has as it's backdrop the impressive slopes of Yulong Xue Shan, usually totally capped in ice and snow, but looking devoid of both when we arrived in the city. We had seen it's icy slopes on the opposite side of the mountain though on the bus trip earlier in the day. Lijiang's old town is the original capital of the Naxi people, a group of Tibetans who moved to this region of Yunnan in the thirteenth ... read more

Up early in Shaxi as we had a hired mini bus (50 yuan couple) waiting to take us to Janchaun to catch a connecting bus to Shangri La. We nearly didn't make it to the waiting taxi on time as we found that we were locked in our courtyard hotel and after getting no response from the owners after banging on their door managed to find a lesser outside door unlocked - all this done by the light of a head torch as it was still dark and very cold! Glynnis and Seamus were waiting and the taxi left as soon as we boarded for the 45 minutes to Jinchaun. Soon we were all aboard a small bus and off to Shangri La (still known by it's original name of Zhongdian) which is situated on a ... read more

Leaving Weishan by minibus (23 Yunnan each), we arrived on the outskirts of Xiaguan (new city, 18 kilometres south of the old Dali) an hour later. We passed many small workshops making the stone pieces for use as tomb entrances. It would have been a major task carrying the twenty or so pieces of grey stone to where ever they were needed as they looked extremely heavy! The bus dropped us off on the highway at the edge of the city where we caught a moto taxi (5 yuan) to the train station where we knew we would be able to find transport to Dali. You feel quite vulnerable in those tiny little motorbike taxi amidst the traffic, particularly when surrounded by larger buses on both sides! We were really shocked at how the city had ... read more

We had only planned to spend a short time in Kunming - mainly to visit the Stone Forrest nearby - before moving on but unfortunately I began to feel unwell and we had to stay longer. It is the capital city of Yunnan province and has a population of over seven million people. Enormous by Australian standards but average by Chinese figures. Kunming has developed rapidly in recent years under China's modernisation plan and that was very obvious to us as we had previously visited the city in mid 2005. To try and counteract traffic issues in large Chinese cities all the bus terminals are now situated on the edges of them eg traffic coming in from the west goes to the Western Terminals and so on. The bus from Jianshui took 3 hours and cost ... read more

We had a long day as we left Vietnam and headed across the border into China where we were to spend a few days in the highlands amidst the rice terraces at Yuanyang. This area covers 2200 square kilometres and despite its astounding beauty, due to it's distant location, the region has not opened to mass tourism as yet. One crop of rice is grown a year and after the harvest in September the terraces are filled with water until planting in April. Most of the women in the region still wear their colourful traditional dress and the terraces were first cultivated over 1300 hundred years ago. It was an hour by minibus from Sapa to the border town of LaoCai where our driver dropped us off at immigration. No problem there and we were soon ... read more