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Our trip to Yunnan (May 1st - 12th 2007)
After making some research on some travel guides and on the web we finally decide to go to Yunnan. It’s a chinese province in the south-western part of the country, bordering Laos and Vietnam to the south and Tibet to the west. Yunnan province is well known for its cultural and ethnical diversity and its breathtaking sceneries but is also considered as one of the most dangerous and middle-agy regions of China.
Day 1 - Kunming, the spring city
We arrive to Kunming, which is in the middle and the capital city of Yunnan province, at 11.30. We then head for the long distance bus station in order to find a bus for Yuanyang, a small village (not even on most of the maps) known for its breathtaking valleys and rice field sceneries. Our bus is tonight at 8. While we are waiting for departure we have lunch in a small chinese restaurant where we feel like we are the local attraction... The meal is not bad but at the end Noar gets a stomach ache. Then, we’re heading towards a pub that was recommended in the ‘’guide du
routard’’. Really nice, good place to rest, it’s kind of our first break of the day.
After a drink and a quick look at the guidebook, we head for the ‘’animal and flowers market’’ (apparently one of the only interesting things to see here in Kunming). The place is really nice, it’s a kind of large market for animals, flowers, tourists (obviously) and ''bangs'' (besides having the ‘’spring city’’ reputation Kunming is also being called ‘’the heaven for hard drugs’’...)!! After that short visit we head back to the bus station to take our first bunk-bus, which is so specific to China.
We laugh a lot especially in the beginning because we have the entire last row for our own, which is basicly the best place in the bus and the only one where we, as westerners, can stretch out completly (chinese people are quite small). Our laughing session is brutally stopped when suddenly Arnaud gets his phone robbed: while he was writing an SMS lying in his bed next to the open window of the second level of the bus a chinese guy apparently legged up to a another one and in one tenth of a second
the phone was gone... Then it became impossible to find him back, by the time we managed to get out of the bus he was probably already out of the station. To say the truth, that experience gave us a chill, and it was only the first day. Whatever, we have one night in the bus and we’re on our way to the rice fields.
Day 2 - Valleys of Yuanyang
We arrive to Yuanyang at 6.30 after 2 breakdowns and an endless number of stops during the night but we are finally here. So we start by renting a minibus which takes us around. While passing through the valleys we really are amazed by the beauty of these artificial ponds. We can't move from our seats, gazing, fascinated, at the scenery. Basicly well the farmers in this region mainly rely on rice to feed themselves, and rice requires a lot of water to grow, and therefore it has to be constantly submerged by water. But the thing is this part of the world is absolutly not ideal to keep water because its very hilly! We are in the middle of valleys where there is only very little
flat land. This is why these farmers have, generation by generation, built ponds all over these valleys and it's really incredible because it is not tens or hundreds but thousands and thousands of these ponds covering entire valleys all around us! The sceneray is absolutly magical, fields of rice sculpted in the mountain and filling entire valleys around us, villages of farmers of different ethnies scatered a little bit everywhere, banana and litchie plantations, and all these people so different than us with habits so odd. We meet many people from different ethnic groups (han, naxi, hani, yi, etc...) which can be recognized by their peculiar way of dressing. This is quite funny actually because women apparently keep their traditionnal dress, which must be, I guess, very comfortable for the field work (!). We also get across some local markets, some very funny women selling different kind of typical token and souvenir (nice dress!!), motor tricycles thinking they are four by fours... A lot of people are smoking in the ''bangs'' we saw in Kunming, whatever they are smoking...
We come back around 2 in the afternoon to Yuanyang, which, at 1800 meters of altitude is a little village
quite nice made of small alleyways, Yuanyangese dwellings, and of a population which is very peculiar and interesting and yet unfortunatly not so open to strangers, which is understandble since all the tourists going there act like if they were in a zoo. Whatever, we manage to find a small hotel quite fast, a chinese style 3 star hotel but really cool with toilets and bathroom, hot (!!) water and even internet!! What do you want more?
After that we quickly visit Yuanyang city center in the afternoon and head back to the hotel to rest a while after the bumpy (no misunderstandings!) night in the bus. In the evening with Timur we find a small place to eat in the street, very different from all the other we saw until then but with its own style and the people there seemed much more open than the others to us. All the street food shops are one next to another in the same street with nice low-tables where they cook in front of you on some kind of barbecue while you are eating. Unfortunatly we scare our female cook a little, she may have thought we were trying to
make a move on her with all the questions we were asking. The most surprizing thing is that we had a lot of trouble finding a place where we could actually eat rice! Where the hell are we?? (in the biggest rice-producing region of China, we are basicly surrounded by rice fields...). We then decide to have a drink in one of the only bars in town (empty but nice), where the bartender plays western music like Avril Lavigne especially for us. But then of course she charged us a little more (5euros for two beers and a coke, expensive by Chinese standarts) ! Well, anyway we then join Noar and our beds for a good night of sleep!!
Day 3 - From the beautiful rice fields to Shangri-La
Arnaud and Timur get up at 5.30 to see a nice cloudy sunrise (no luck) and finally come back to sleep. At 9 departure for Kunming in a regular bus, full of chinese. It's interesting to see how the environment changes as we move more to the north. In the beginning we can see a stream of mountains with a sub-tropical vegetation and cultures of rice, banana, litchie and
all kinds of things. Two hours later we are on flat land and we see a lot of cereal type of fields and villages all along the road.
We arrive at Kunming at 4.30 in the afternoon, and we are very lucky because we manage to get 3 tickets out of the last 4 for the bunk-bus going to Zhongdian! Once we finish eating , we go back to the bus station to take the bunk-bus for Zhongdian. We enter the bus and take 3 small beds in the front. Arnaud puts his feet on the pillow of the chinese guy in front of him who gets angry and sends us in the back of the bus. Finally, like in the first bus, we have the large beds in the back which are the best places, perfect!! So we take off, and after half an hour the first breakdown happens... We’re stopped, for two and a half hours, that’s a bad start but the driver seems to be wanting to catch up on the schedule (the driver was ‘’hen hao’’). The second breakdown happens around 7 in the morning, this time for half an hour. At 8.10 we finally
arrive at Zhongdian but we still don’t understand how we managed to arrive two and a half hours earlier than the schedule with nearly three hours of breakdown??? Maybe that explains all the bumps and jumps we made all night long in our beds! Anyway, here we are in ‘’Shangri-la’’, that’s the most important thing, this stage (Yuanyang) was by far the longest of all the trip: 20 hours of bus straight!!
Day 4 - Shangri-La, heaven on earth
We start looking right away for a guest inn which we see in our guides (Tibet Inn). Again, the rooms and all are perfect, we have everything we need and it’s not so expensive. We can say we are quite lucky on this trip because the weather is very nice and we only get rainy wheather when we are in the bus. After taking care of the rooms and having a little rest we eat breakfast. Actually this is where we realize that a lot of things in tibetan culture are made of Yak (which is like a big hairy cow): Yak butter, Yak cheese, Yak pancake, Yak steak and even coffee with Yak.. Not that bad actually, just
a little bit hard to swallow, and you're definitly full after that kind of breakfast..
So after breakfast we rent a small minibus for the whole day: we’re on our way to the infamous ‘’Shangri-La’’, the paradise on earth... We first head up to a tibetan buddhist monastery where 600 monks are actually living (among which half of them seem to be a little ‘’high’’). We really feel that we are in Tibet (although we never went there), the landscape has totally changed from the south to the north, now we are looking to a valley surrounded by huge snow-topped mountains. The highest ones on earth actually, we are on one of the highest regions of the planet (Zhongdian is at 3500 m). It’s really breathtaking but to say the truth, after all we heard about this place, the ‘’paradise on earth’’, we are a little bit disappointed by what we have found.
In the afternoon we decide to go for a trek on horseback in the valley. Actually the people where our driver leads us to are crooked and try to charge us more money 100 metres after we start the trek, and so we decide not
to do it... So it is quite a short trek, but still it’s kind of fun, the horses are completely stupid and they never really agree to do what we want them to, Noar is ok on his horse, Timur ‘’el cavallero’’ and for me well I nearly fell down from my horse! (and meanwhile nearly lost my camera!)
After that our driver takes us to a hot water spring where we do not actually bath or what but instead we decide to eat something and then take a walk in the surrounding area.
Back there it’s sunbathing time for us in the inner court of the inn, at the same time we take a look at the guidebook to see what we can do next. We really enjoy resting this afternoon because we really are tired all the time due to the altitude. Any little effort we make just draws out all of our energy!
In the afternoon we hang out in the old city of Zhongdian where we have a lot of fun trying to bargain stuff in the little shops until the shopkeepers go crazy! That’s where we meet a very interesting couple, a
French guy and his Chinese girlfriend (around 55 and 35 years old) who are just returning from mount Everest! (Actually they didn’t make it to the top but went quite far). They have also been to Lijiang, where we plan to go, so they can tell us about the place and give us some tips on what to do there. We continue wandering around until we arrive to the old city’s center place where we see there is a big gathering of the local people that came to perform a (not so) traditionnal group dance with Tibetan music on background.
We are then back at the inn after a long and tiring day. At diner we meet again very interesting guys from Belgium who ask us for some directions. These crazy guys are actually travelling by bicycle all over China and India for more than 15000 kms! That’s too tiring for us even to listen to and so we finally decide to go to sleep and get ready for tomorrow’s trek in the ‘’Tiger Leaping Gorge’’!!
PS: Thank god we have heated blankets!! It's really, really cold up here at night! Actually even during day as long as
you are out in the sun it's okay, it's even warming and all so there's no problem but as soon as you're in a shady place or when the sun sets well paradise on earth is as cold as hell..
Day 5 - Tiger Leaping Gorge - Qiaotou
After a good night of sleep (too good actually: we woke up late) and a light breakfast, with Yak butter, eggs and Yak coffee, at 8 o’clock our driver picks us up and we head to Qiaotou, which is actually the starting point of the gorges trek. We arrive at 10.30 and we start the long walk. The scenery is again really breathtaking, but somewhat different than the beauty of rice fields in Yuanyang, we are now at 2500 metres high walking in the middle of high cereal fields of many colours and trees with blossomming flowers, ahead of us we can see the pathway which follows the flank of the gorges, we also hear the loud voice coming from the tiger’s gorge becoming more and more like a whisper as we go higher. We cannot see the end of the road which disappears away at the next curve the
gorge takes and we can only gaze at the jade dragon mountains which stand still, majestic, in the background and we keep on walking.
The air is just so pure we really enjoy every glimps of it that we can breath, you really can only understand us if you live in a place such as Shanghai where it’s almost impossible to see the sun nearly 10 months a year because of pollution (partly).. It takes us one hour and a half to get to the ‘’28 turns’’, the most difficult point of the trek as told by the guidebook. Its quite tiring mainly because we have around 17-18 kilos packing on our backs, because the road is going upwards at this point and also because we are not yet used to the altitude here. At one point, while crossing a little farm, we fall upon a local guy who has a mule and offers to carry our bags with his mule to the top. After short negotiations Arno and I finally give up and the guy carries our bags until the highest point of the path, only Timur wants to keep his but he somehow manages to keep up
with the rythme.
When we finally arrive to the top we really do not have regrets about having hired the guy, especially the last part of the ascension was really hard and we had to stop many times to catch our breath. We finally arrive to the ‘’Half-way Inn’’, a small guest house which, obviously, is at the middle of the long road. It’s the end of the first day’s walk for us and the sky is getting darker. It took approximatly 8 hours to walk from the Qiaotou to the half-way inn and for now it has been absolutly sensationnal, a superb weather, a really breathtaking scenery and a little bit of exersize for us...what do you want more! The guest house itself is also nice, it’s made a little bit like the other houses we could see around when walking and it had a decent confort, unfortunatly no hot water but at least showers but to say the truth this time it's more than enough for us. We just lie back and enjoy the view, the jade dragon mountains, for a moment and then we go to eat something. This is where we meet another very interesting
French couple (Thomas and Betty) with whom we share our dinner. We find out they are actually hardcore travelers expecially interested in Asia and that they were living in India for 4 months and were planning to travel through China and central Asia to then pass from Central Asia, Istanbul and the Balkans and finally arrive in France! It was a nice evening and we can finally get a good night of sleep.
Day 6 - Tiger Leaping Rock and Walnut garden
We take things easy in the morning for the 6th day of our trip. We wake up late and around 10 we are on our way to the place that makes this place so famous. After singing the famous ‘’Captain Jack’’ song in the gorges and walking for two hours we arrive at Tina’s guest house. There we meet the Thomas and Betty again and we continue walking with them. We finally arrive to the ‘’Tiger Leaping Rock’’. This is the place where supposingly a Tiger who was fleeing from a hunter crossed the gorge by jumpimg over the gap...which is about 30 metres wide, well it should have been a really long jump surely. This
is actually the narrowest place on the whole Yangtze river, approximatly 10-15 metres wide, and the river here is like rapids. It’s a very nice place, it’s also a little slopy and there is definitly too many tourists here. actually this is the only place in the gorge where we have access by road and that's why there is many more people here than in the rest of the road.
So we go down to the riverside and rest our bodies for a little while, especially our feet which really are starting to hurt after walking for two days. To climb up again to the road we had to take a ladder of more than 20 metres long which was a little bit scary. We had a conversation with a chinese guy from Kunming who was speaking very well english and we complained to him about the fact that every 5 kilometres or what we had to give more money in order to be able to continue, but he didn’t seem to agree with us.
Well, anyway, we arrive finally around 5 in the afternoon to the Walnut garden, which is another guest inn. The place is very
nice, there are some peasant houses around and plenty of walnut trees. While Arno and Betty decide to stay and rest a little, we, Thomas, Timur and myself, decide to have a walk in the gardens around. That’s something we won’t regret even after a day of walking we have just done! We discover the life of the peasants there, we see some typical houses of the people of this region. We are even invited by a family living there during a short rain and we have the opportunity to chat with them a little bit, although it was hard to communicate (even though Timur speaks Chinese a little). So after one and a half hour we go back the the inn and we finish the day by eating with a group of elderly French people (half of them finished eating a little bit drunk), it was quite fun.
Day 7 - Arrival at Lijiang
A very good night of sleep again! It’s incredible to see how well you can sleep when you tire a lot but do not have stress. We wake up a 9.45, we eat with the french couple who want to go back to
Qiaotou in order to continue towards Lijiang more easily, while we decide to continue and finish the trek and then to reach Daju, which is at the other end of the gorge, by ferry. The owner of the inn drives us to a advanced place from which we can walk more easily to the ferry since we have to catch a bus in Daju and so we don’t have enough time to walk all the way.
Once we get off the car we start walking in a quite aride place towards the ferry. Half an hour later we finally arrive to the ‘’ferry’’ which looks pretty much like the ‘’Débarquement’’ ferries in Normandy during WW2. We take this ‘’old ferry’’ which takes us across the Yangtze river to the other bank while Timur thinks he is Indiana Jones! 45 minutes later we finally arrive to Daju, witch appears to us as an oasis in the middle of the desert. It’s a very tiny village which lives on fish farming and that has many small ponds and flowers all over the place and which is basicly in the middle of nowhere. We really liked Daju even though we didn’t stay
too long and we enjoyed eating in a little courtyard with a pond and climbing plants while waiting for the bus which is going to take us to Lijiang.
3 hours of bus travel later, with ¾ of it being cubblestones and zigzags between the mountains with, again, amazing sceneries, we finally arrive at again we are lucky to have a very nice weather. Our luck doesn’t run off in the afternoon as we manage to find a very nice guest inn (Tibet Inn again)for a good price (Lijiang is more expensive than other cities in Yunnan, especially in the period where we are which is the may holiday for chinese) and in a very good place, basicly it’s just on the edge of old city and just in front of an english pub.
As I said it is may holiday, which is one of the three holiday weeks in the year, for chinese and this is the most famous place in Yunnan, so it’s literrally full of chinese tourists but surprisingly it doesn’t bother us, and it’s even interesting to see the chinese enjoy their holiday and have fun like that. So we unpack and head right
away for the old city which is incredibly large. Actually the whole Lijiang city is divided into two distinct parts, the old and new ones, and here the old city is nearly the same size as the new one. But the difference is that nobody actually lives in the old city anymore and all of the houses have become little shops that sell all kind of stuff, there are many channels going through the city with clean water and restaurants or nightclubs or pubs around it, at night some people even make paper plate-like things with candles in the middles and just leave it floating on the water and they slowly flow in the little channels to create a very festive and traditionnal-like environment. It’s really interesting!
We could stay one week in this place, even though it draws a lot of tourists. We walk in the city and climb to it’s highest point where we can contemplate the city and see how it is organized. There we buy some chinese caligraphy-style paintings which are really nice for inner decoration. We then head for the restaurants quarters to eat, and although it’s quite expensive, and so we don’t eat
as much as we would have wanted to, we are invited to another table with chinese people to share their drinks! They propose us their ‘’guijiu’’, which is pretty much like ‘’baijiu’’, for those who know, a strong alcohol which is coming from Guilin, the province next to Yunnan, and that has a rotten french camembert-like taste...it’s not that bad actually!
Very good ambiance, people singing and playing music, restaurants along the water channels and little red lamps everywhere you where you look at! After a good meal we head to the area with the nighclubs and the bars. As soon as we enter the first bar there are many chinese who want to invite us to their tables to drink with them! We choose to go with a little group who gives us plenty of alcohol during all night! Around 1.30 the night has already started very well and now we are in a karaoke place and all the chinese there want us to perform for them! What could we do? After some hesitations we couldn’t deceive them and decided to get on the stage to give them what they asked for! 3 micros, one stage and 3
Euromedians! The song is ‘’Captain Jack’’ of course and, well, even though we are sure they didn’t understand much of it we definitly had good fun. It’s so bad we do not have any picture of that ‘’crazy’’ night, now nobody will believe us..damn..
Day 8 - Lazy day
Of course today we wake up late, around noon, so we have to change our plans for the day but in the end it’s alright. After an easy awakening we eat around 2 and try to plan our day for tomorrow, we try to obtain tickets for the jade dragon mountains and for the return to Kunming at the same time. Then we hang out in the city just wandering around and bargaining at all the shops to see if we can find interesting things, it’s really fun! Then we have a drink at the english pub in front of our guest house, we play pool and just relax for the day. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day!
Day 9 - Baisha and Doctor Ho
Timur finds he motivation to (at the end we’re gonna get them!) wake up at 6.30 in order to get tickets
for the jade dragon mountains...and finally is able to get them at 2 o’clock. This afternoon we’re going to visit Baisha by bycycle, but after 10 kms with a very strong wind just on our front we stop a little minivan who kindly accepts to take us where we want to go (well after the hard day we had yesterday we couldn’t be very fresh!) We really enjoy that ride. So we arrive in Baisha, a very nice little village which adapted itself to the recent tourism activities. As soon as we arrive there a 74 years old ‘’Naxi’’ (local minority) lady greets us and invites us to her house to drink a cup of tea. We are delighted and we follow her to her small house, so we have the chance to see what a Naxi house is and we have good fun because she dresses us up as Naxi people, but in fact she fooled us because when we prepare ourselves to leaves she demands money from us. We are completely disappointed, we feel we have been stabbed in our backs, it’s so sad to see what tourism makes to people. Well anyway, we had a small argument
and we grudgingly gave her a little money saying we don’t have anything else on us because we are students.
We continue wandering in the city and this time we meet a local celebrity: Dr.Ho! Now this was really cool, he must be one of the most well-known doctor around and he shows all the articles that have been written about him by many medias (even famous ones like national geographic etc). He is very generous and kind and is like a master in Chinese medecine. He has a lot of different kinds of plants in his backyard and says that he is making his medecine from these. Apparently he sends some of his medecine all over the world and never expects to be paid because, for him, if you wait for people to give you money then the person you want to cure can die while waiting. Noar has back pains so Dr.Ho gives him some of his secret potion, we’ll see what happens! By the way, Dr.Ho is 84 and is in very good shape!
We then head back to Lijiang and we return the bycycles to the place we rented them. At night, we randomly
find another bar street where the ambiance is even crazier! Again everywhere is full of people and people in the bars on the right sing ‘’against’’ the people on the bars on the left of the channel! They try to compete by successivly singing a song until one of the parties doesn’t have anymore songs to sing! Tomorrow we have to wake up early so we cannot stay too long.
Day 10 - Jade Dragon Mountains
We wake up at 8 for a day which unfortunatly will happen to be not as good as we would have expected it to be. At 10.30 we head to the Jade Dragon Mountains. It’s so touristic that this takes away all of this place’s beauty and interest. After waiting in the queue for a long time finally at 3 we can take the cable car which is going to take us to the top. Actually the only interesting thing there is that you are at 4680 metre of altitude, you have difficulty breathing and your heart beats out strongly inside your chest. The chinese have all bought oxygen masks with bottles and it’s funny to see them like that but except
from that there is really nothing to see and we soon go down again. Finally it was not worth all that money and time that it cost us, too bad. We head back to Lijiang and at night we take a VIP (!) bus to Kunming and we have ‘’Finding Nemo’’ and ‘’Mulan’’ in Chinese before we sleep, nice!
Day 11 - Shilin
We arrive to Kunming at 5 in the morning and we go right away to a hotel in order to find a room. We sleep for 2 hours because except Timur we couldn’t sleep very well. Today we are going to visit Shilin, the stone forest. In fact when we arrive there we find out it’s a really boring touristic place and it’s not really worth seeing. It’s some kind of a big parc with many ways to go but we decide to follow our own road off the path and finally we spend a nice time just walking in the forest. Back in Kunming we head for McDonalds that we havn’t seen for at least 10 days! What a relief! Then we spend one hour in a chinese-size internet café before going back to sleep and prepare ourselves for the flight tomorrow.
Day 12 - End of the trip
We have our plane back to Shanghai. It’s the end of a very nice trip in a place of great interest, a place out of time unfortunatly struck in some areas by excessive tourism but still a very beautiful area where we had a real good time.
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