…did not consist of much. But really, it wouldn’t, since our flight landed us in Kunming at 2:30pm. We’d already booked the Hump hostel, and so we just had to navigate the buses to get us there. Quickly we found that the hostel directions were… slightly off, and would continue to be so for our entire stay. (Sigh!) Marlie and I wandered the afternoon around Brilliant Plaza and other sparkly named Plazas. The first obvious difference between Kunming and Kaifeng was the sky. We could actually see BLUE and clouds. It’s sad that smog has become the norm for us.
Besides plazas, there are dinosaurs EVERYWHERE. I asked Josh later about it (since he was in Kunming two years ago) and he said it was because a lot of fossils were found in the area. There’s even a portion of the city dedicated to it, and I didn’t learn that until we were *leaving* Kunming, sadly. I really wanted to go to the Zoology museum, but we never got the chance.
While we walked we also found a strange temple but it was closed and we never did return to see what it was like. There was also a DQ nearby, and so I had to indulge myself.
We received two tickets for a free beer and the other for a free coffee/tea, but once we returned to the hostel after our wandering, it was already the hostel’s happy hour, and so we took advantage of that instead of using our tickets. The Hump had a really nice décor, but the other groups felt very closed off to interruption, so we never tried to talk to anyone. It was a a little intimidating. We got a bit bored in our corner of the Hump, so we wandered out again and stumbled upon what HAD to be the club district. Neither of us were particularly in the mood (and we never were, honestly), but it was amusing nonetheless. Our wandering took us in a large-ish circle all the way back to the Hump. A decent if not particularly eventful first day!
Day 2 – Hitchcock
We needed to have PLANS for our second day in Kunming. It would still be a lot of walking, but we were okay with that after only one day of our holiday started. We wanted to be prepared for anything, and we’d both forgotten to grab umbrellas from our room. Our key wasn’t working, so we tried to ask the workers at the counter, but we caught them at a bad time and we got impatient waiting, so we figured we’d take our chances. Our key cards for our door at the Hump NEVER worked. We always had to ask to get our room unlocked. It was a mild irritation.
But we left, sans umbrellas, and took a bus to a north-western part of the Kunming downtown and made our way walking to Green Lake Park. We knew we weren’t really that close, and it took us about an hour or more to get to the park, but that was fine. We found puppies being sold in boxes (sad), a Doctor Who magazine in Chinese (which I was stupid and did not buy), a Snoopy store, some freaky bearded mannequins, and a library that we thought was the entrance to the park. It was not.
The park was full of birds. Scary scary birds.
Beyond that, Green Lake Park didn’t offer us much. There were some nicely painted pagodas and walkways, but the birds were definitely the selling point. We found some ducks eventually, and that was nice to just have a change from all the white pigeon/gulls.
Escaping from the birds, we headed to Yuantong Temple. There was no water in the pool surrounding, so it was a bit dismal though we tried to make the best of it. At least the entrance fee was only a few kuai, so we didn’t feel we lost much. There were some great Chinglish signs, like “Danger Zone” and “Please Don’t be Crowded”. We had a vague notion to visit the area near the zoo, and it was nearing the time we could hit up some happy hours, so we tried to find either a bar to settle into, or another park. We ended up circling northward around the zoo (with a rollercoaster inside!), though we decided that a zoo in China would definitely be depressing (and Josh later confirmed this idea after visiting the Beijing Zoo) and continued on what turned into the electronics district. We passed shop after shop selling every electronic, camera, and digital appliance you could think of. A park was soon within our grasp, but when we reached Lotus “Pund” (as the sign said) it had begun raining. The park didn’t look very interesting, especially since we were getting drenched, so we decided it was DEFINITELY time for dinner and drinks.
Wet and hungry, we reached Salvador’s. It was warm and really fantastic looking inside, and we ended up staying there for at least three hours eating (fried goat cheese sticks [see left] and a quesadilla for me) and having beer. We rotated our seats inward because we wanted to use the internet, and at some point Marlie stood up, revealing her Beloit hoodie. Two guys across the bar from us asked if we were actually from Beloit. Turns out, they were two graduates of 2003/4 and they run a coffee shop in Dali called the Flying Turtle. Unfortunately, we never got their names, but one of them looked REAAALLY familiar for some reason.
Marlie and I got a little weary of Salvador’s and set out for some other bars. It took us FAR too long to find a very Chinese-feeling bar called the Halfway Bar. And it sadly wasn’t really worth it. It was really really smoky and we felt a little unwelcome, being the only obvious foreigners in the bar. So that day ended on a slight disappointment, but at least we found Salvador’s! (Which I recommend if anyone visits Kunming).
Day 3 – Stone Forest
石林, Shi Lin or the Stone Forest was our goal for the day. We went through a lot of crazy bus times to get there and to get back into Kunming, but I think it was definitely worth it. The traffic in Kunming is horrendous since they don’t have a subway system, but it’s being built, so there are roads blocked off all over the city and the buses are jammed full of people. Not the most pleasant experience. But we got out of the city, albeit taking longer than we wanted, and on our way to Stone Forest.
Stone Forest is what it sounds like—huge stone and rock formations like.. a forest. We met two Americans on the bus, Ben and Kara, husband and wife, but they were living in Shanghai and on vacation like we were. Ben was essentially fluent, and very helpful and not putout when we asked if we could stick with them while exploring the forest.
We ate lunch with locals, with Ben’s help, and got some interesting new fruit that tasted slightly like a citrus-y banana. I want to know what they were, because I really liked them.
Otherwise, Stone Forest isn’t much of a place to talk about, but to show, so here are a bunch of photos. It’s hard to capture the magnitude of the place and how small you feel, but… I tried. We traversed the paths in an attempt to escape the Chinese tourist groups, because they were loud, took up too much space, and very slow.
After the absurdly long bus ride back to the Hump we didn’t want to travel any more that day, so we had dinner and drinks at the Hump. They advertised Kunming’s famous “Over the Bridge Noodles”, so we got those and pizza bread. The noodles were crazy spicy, but very good. And then it was watching a bit of How I Met Your Mother and an early bedtime.
...Coming up! Li Jiang, Yunnan Province!
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