I guess it's third time lucky after all. Because of my scheduling difficulties with the short 15-day free visa I had, I decided to bypass the provincial capital of Kunming in transit twice during my first two weeks here in Yunnan as I made my way up through the province, telling myself I would come back again. And indeed I finally did. After an early morning 7h bus ride northwards again, I finally arrived back in Kunming for what I guess would be my last time in a while. And this time, I did indeed manage to stay several days to check it out. Kunming is pretty much everything you would expect from a large Chinese city. Sprawling, densely-populated with heavy traffic, and with a mixture of the spanking new skyscrapers that have become symbolic of ... read more

And so with the final grains of sand in my hour glass tourist visa falling, I had to race down south to the Vietnamese border for (yet another) visa run. No stranger to such a necessity, having already had to do the same twice in Thailand, this time it was nevertheless a much more arduous journey. It started with a early morning speedy one hour flight from the Shangri-la airport back to Kunming. Then from Kunming it was a twenty minute subway transfer from the airport to the East bus station. Apart from some waiting time here and there between, things had been relatively straight-forward, and I was scheduled to arrive at the Hekou-Lao Cai border with Vietnam sometime in the early evening. I'd read that the border officially closes at 11 pm Chinese ... read more

When I was reading LP several months ago and thinking about this next leg of my travels in Yunnan, I already got the feeling that this part could very well be the highlight. And it indeed hasn't disappointed. Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest in the world, where the mighty Yangtze flows through a series of rapids, and named after a rather implausible story, was my next stop. Legend has it that a tiger once leapt from one of the rocks in the middle of the gorge to the other bank to escape a hunter. As beautifully romantic it is, having now seen the rock and the 40m or so of crashing rapids the tiger would have had to bound over, I can safely say it really is quite impossible. But before I got to ... read more

Did somebody say "tourists"? It was a 3.5h bus ride from Old Dali to Lijiang, another city with a distinctive ancient, labyrinthine portion in the centre. But if Dali is laid-back, hippie and bohemian, then Lijiang is its noisy, restored, main-stream counterpart. Arriving close to the country's national day holidays certainly didn't help, as the maze-like narrow streets of Old Lijiang were packed from dawn to dusk. A Unesco World Heritage site, with the imposing Jade Dragon Snow Mountain as backdrop, Lijiang has been more than discovered by domestic tourists. Its restored streets and traditional buildings are filled with cafes, restaurants, souvenir shops, bars, guesthouses, banks, tour agencies, you name it. And this weekend, it almost seemed like all of China must have been in Lijiang! It's still a pretty place though, notwithstanding the crowd, which ... read more

And so after that brief one week transit in Laos, and another 7h bus ride later, I say hello to the Middle Kingdom. Crossing the Boten-Mohan border, it became apparent very quickly that I'd entered another country. Gone were the quiet small-laned streets and rural backdrops. Enter large, super-highways, flanked by equally imposing but tackily opulent buildings. Yes, welcome to China, centre of the ongoing Asian economic miracle. And my first stop was Jinghong, the capital of the Xishuangbanna region in Yunnan province, in the far southwest of this large country. Despite it being very much a secondary city, it could hardly be more different from my last stop in Laos. Bustling, with lots of people. LOUD-talking people (we are in China after all), many conversing in what I presume to be some kind of Yunnanese ... read more