Last month I decided to hit the road and travel around southern China. Tons of adventures: illegal casinos, catching a thief, getting lost in the mountains, hitching a ride to the burmese border and many more. However most are best told in person so for now I’m going to stick to pictures.
Kunming is a beautiful city in Yunnan province. Way down south but high enough that it enjoys nice spring-like weather pretty much year round. For history buffs (and to complete the foreshadowing from the last entry) it was also the last stop on the Burma Road (and later after the Japanese took IndoChina the “Hump”) during WWII. A great city and my base of operations for the next couple of weeks.
This part of China has quite a bit of history which can be seen around town
One of two pagodas surrounded by old people playing Mahjong
Temple outside of town. Really well taken care of and like much of the places I’d visit in this part of the country (far from the central government) actually had real monks living and working on-site. This one is famous for a series of 500 life size and reallistic statues done by a famous sculptor several hundred years ago. At the time they were considered in bad taste (as they looked too real). So apparently this guy decides to model the really ugly ones after his critics.
The guy with the strange bike would sell you the chance to ride it for a couple of yuan.
In Asia you get used to bad toilets. But in the south they are a breed apart. At a bar I was going they had these trenchs with a trickle of water running through the bottom. Use your imagination. Oh wait never mind I hve a picture.
About 2 hours south-east of Kunming is a place called “Shilin” or “Stone Forest”. It is pretty but in Feb. the entrance price was raised from 20 to 140 yuan. That is insane. Just for reference it costs about 60 to get into the Forbiddon City. So here are a bunch of pictures so no one else needs to get ripped off.
From the trainstation it is a quick 10 minute “taxi” to Shilin.
Along the way I ended up meeting these three Chinese tourists from Nanjing who I nicknamed “The communist and elves”
The communist
Me and the elves
Here are 5 quick photos to save you some cash:
But don’t missunderstand me. It was a pretty cool place, just not that cool.
The view looking out from a platform at the highest point in the park.
After taking the picture the communist lead us to the ledge that you can see immediately behind me (on the other side of the water). Where he and the elves sat and proceeded to have lunch without regard to the hundreds of tourists trying to get a picture just like the one of me above. Kind of cool to know I could be in a picture hanging on some Chinese tourist wall right now.
Did I mention the wild elephants?
Bus back to Kunming and then caught a flight to Ruili. Well actually to Mangshi where I hitchhiked for the first time to get to Ruili.
Ruili itself is a strange town. Reminds me of what I think the wild west would be like if it existed in 2006. It is a border town between China and Burma. China sells manufactured goods and buys jade and heroin. As a result you have a bunch of strange stuff happening. There is a huge party scene for such a small town. There are casinos (which are illegal in China) operating openly. There are tons of cops and army people.
And apparently there is a midnight fair for the kiddies.
Which involves some minority dance routines.
After the fair I ended up at another bar that only sold beers by the dozen. Oh, didn’t I mention that above. Guess that is another one of the stories best told in person. However in this case I beat the waitress at enough games of rock/paper/scissor to get my beers one at a time.
After a couple days in Ruili it was definately time to move on…to be continued.