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Published: October 27th 2008
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The Stone Forest
The Stone Forest is very popular! Today I went to the Stone Forest which is 90 km away from Kunming. It's a World Heritage site consisting of stone sculptures that were formed 200 million years ago when there was a huge lake in the area. There are trails around the formations as well as in between. Many of the rocks have names, although they didn't always look like the name. I couldn't see either elephant , when it was on a platform or when it had a camel on its back.
We had four hours to walk around the park so I did a walk through the Minor Stone Forest, circle of the Major Stone Forest, and then did some of the inner trails. It's a popular place and was very crowded. It was overcast with a few sprinkles, but pretty warm and I really didn't need a rain coat. I went to the far end of the park, aka "The Periphery", and it was almost deserted. There were lots of police and securoty officers in other parts of the park, but this are had signs with a line through a police man. They did have SOS phones at regular intervals so I wasn't worried. The
trails were steep and very narrow. I had trouble fitting sideways through a few of them! There were ssome igns and things were generally well marked, although I ran out of trail at one point and had a scary 15 minutes while I tried to backtrack. I finally started to recognize a few rocks when I saw a guy waving at me. I had passed him earlier and he was nice enough to point me back to the main trail.
When I can, I'll add some photos- I got some neat reflection shots when the sun came out.
I wasn't really hungry at lunch time so I waited until I was back in Kunming to get dinner. There's a restaurant across from the hotel so I went there. It was huge with tables for 10-12 people downstairs and table for six upstairs. I wasn't sure what to order (no General's Chicken or pork fried rice on the menu plus no English or pictures) so the waiter finally pointed to something and I agreed. It was the Kunming-famous rainbow noodles. They brought a big bowl of steaming broth and then about 10 plates of stuff. The put mosy of them in the broth and then added a bowl of rice noodles which were like really fat spaghetti. My chop stick skills are not what I thought they were and I really had a hard time eating. Plus, there were mushrooms to avoid and some green things that tasted like dead fish plus some red things that were the hottest thing I've ever tasted! I did my best and I only saw the waiter laugh at me once. There were no napkins so I was bent over the bowl, but I realized about halfway through that I had splattered all over my shirt and pants. It will be laundry in the sink later tonight!
Mo arrives tomorrow so I'm going to the Flower and Bird Market in the morning and then meeting her at the airport. More soon...
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Feng
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Enjoy your trip. Be safe
Nice noodles. I miss it.... Have a wonderful trip!! Feng from CA