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Published: November 8th 2009
This was our only full day in Kunming as we fly in yesterday afternoon and fly out early tomorrow morning for Lijiang.
On today’s itinerary is approximately 2 hour bus ride to the famous Stone Forest. The Stone Forest is limestone pillars that can be as high as 30m and resembles a petrified forest. The area that is open to the tourist is quite large and our guide told us that it can take up to 3 days to explore the whole area.
We had two options presented to us, jump on a golf cart and travel around the surrounding road and have the occasional photography stop. Or we could go for a walk, I took the later. There are several paths that tourists can take while exploring the Stone Forest, we took one where the path gets very squeezy, in particular for a big guy like me! I think some of the people that decided on the walking option weren’t overly happy with the confided and the number of steps up and down that we had to do, but it was all good as I have been eating way too much good(bad) food and need the exercise.
On our way back to Kunming we stopped off at a local village. There was an embroidery shop in the village where some of the pieces take 18 months to make, very cool, yet very expensive. A piece around the size of an A3 piece of paper will cost you around YUAN 18,000 or AUD$3,000. Some of the smaller pieces were around YUAN 200, but nothing really interested me so I went and wondered around the village where they had corn(maize) and chillies drying.
We had taken up the option to go to a show called Dynamic Yunnan when we got back to Kunming this evening. The show uses folk songs and dances from the local minority groups and the cast is made up of the local minority groups. The show took a little while to become popular for the locals and tourists to attend, but now it is a very popular show after the Chinese president took the show to Brazil a few years ago. The show was very cool (except some of the ignorant people in crowd who videotaped the show - very annoying when you see white screens in the crowd in a dark cinema), so
if you are ever in Kunming this would be a definite go to event (in my opinion). However it is a fairly glitzy performance, so if you are more interested a grass roots performance by a local minority, this probably isn’t for you.
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