Blogs from Yunnan, China, Asia - page 19

Yunnan, just by name it could inspire so many questions... Always seems to have a veil of mystery, the most mysterious of all is of course famous Shangri-La, which was originally called Di qi, but changed to Shangri-La for the famous book &moive "Lost Horizon" - James Hilton. I have to say the world has been giving too much credit to the name "Shangri-La", which misleads many people to have very high expectation about the place Shangri-La. I am one of them. Before I went there, every mentioning of Shangri-La made me feel it's a place like "heaven", huge grass land with yaks everywhere, having lake-blue sky and snow-capped mountains as backgroud, local people dressing in their traditional Tibetan style clothes, milking the yaks, making barley wine and dancing around the fire at night. Somewhere hidden ... read more

So once more I headed east to spend some time in my beloved China, it has been a few years so clearly I was due a visit. The plan was to spend a few days in Shanghai where fellow sinophile Jim has been working then we'd travel west to the province of Yunnan (well, these days is it hard to pick an area I haven't actually visited in China). Anyway, here's part one of the trip, I took way too many photos (1600+) and so will need to break the trip down to two blogs, stay tuned for part two, you lucky people! I landed in Shanghai and as ever wanted to jump straight on to the Maglev and enjoy the smooth, speedy ride into Shanghai. In 2005 the ride was lovely, the train was clean ... read more

As the bus from Yuanyang wound its way down from the astounding rice terraces and then along the spectacular Red River towards Vietnam, I took a deep breath of acrid passive cigarette smoke from the guy smoking behind, dodged the phlegm from the woman spitting in the aisle and then chuckled as a baby vomited all over Sophie's bag. I looked up out of the window and saw bridge after amazing bridge, impossibly clinging to the sheer edge of the river valley. I then sighed, wondering why we were bouncing along on the unsealed track underneath the bridge supports. I was then gleefully handed half a pomelo, and encouraged to try the delicious fruit by the Han bus conductor as she ignored the dishevelled, and frankly hungry looking hill tribe folk sitting behind me. We then ... read more

The time has come and after 5 weeks we have reached the end of our time in China! For our last stop on our adventure here, we chose to head to the Yuanyang rice terraces in South Yunnan, just a few hours from the Vietnam border. Although we had seen great rice terraces a few weeks ago in Guilin, we had heard that Yuanyang was extra special and somewhere we should not miss. Plus it was on the way to Hekou, the town on the Chinese side of the border crossing to 'Nam that we needed to leave from, so a handy stop over. The bus was supposed to take 6 hours from Kunming to Xinjie, the old town of Yuanyang and the starting point of the rice terraces, but as usual took longer and after ... read more

When travelling, you always meet other travellers who have been to the place you are planning on going to next, and what they tell you about that place can either make you really look forward to it or wish you were giving it a miss, depending on what they experienced there. It’s great to hear other people’s stories about places you are about to visit, as they can be a good source of information as well as get you excited for that place, but occasionally what you hear can be misleading – Kunming is the perfect example of this. We had been planning on going to Kunming from Lijiang for ages; it was always in our China itinerary as it was on the way down to the rice terraces we wanted to see, just for a ... read more