Road to Kunming

The trip from Hong Kong to Kunming started off with a three-hour train ride from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, home of the 2010 Asian Games, which I believe start in a few weeks. We took the subway from one train station to another and then had to go through Chinese immigration again in order to go to the mainland. The main drama occurred because one of the people in our group hadn’t realized that she needed a Chinese visa to travel into the mainland. Glad it wasn’t me. (She ended up getting a visa and joining us a few days later.)

The trip from Guangzhou to Kunming was long. Damn long. It was a 25-hour train ride from start to finish. Despite this, however, the trip wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Thanks to the proper recipe of cold medication and Advil PM, I have been able to knock out at least 10-hours on all of the train trips.

We arrived at the train station in Kunming at around 3 pm and took some time to clean up after the epic train ride. Afterwards, we took a little walking tour of Kunming. The tour took us to the Bird and Flower market (guess what was sold there) and culminated in a trip to a pretty (and pretty touristy) garden with a lake that has a name that I can’t think of at the moment. It was nice, especially at night, and afterwards, we cabbed back to the hotel.

Along the way, we stopped for dinner. We stopped at a place for a local specialty. I’ll look up the name to be sure (I have no internet at the moment), but it’s something like Over The Bridge Soup. (Note: I looked it up. It is Over the Bridge Soup.) It was a soup in which we were given a bowl of hot water and vegetables. Along with this, we were given noodles that had been pre-cooked and a plate of raw meat and vegetables. The soup was near boiling and the point was to put the raw meat and vegetables into the soup and let it cook while you stirred everything around. I had chicken and pork. It was good, but it did things to my stomach that I may never forgive. In any event, it was a proper preparation for the next night’s hot pot.

After returning to the hotel, it was a little early, so a few of us decided to go to a bar down the street and have some more Chinese beer. We had a few too many, but we didn’t have huge plans that were very early the next morning, so a little hangover wasn’t a big deal. Just having a hangover from Chinese beer was a miracle all in and of itself.

The next day was our only full day in Kunming. Now, Kunming doesn’t have a whole lot of tourist attractions, and the big one is a few hours away. That attraction would be the Stone Forest. Since we weren’t doing anything else in town, all of us hopped on a two-hour bus from the hotel to the Stone Forest. The Stone Forest is an area with thousands of limestone hills and columns shooting up from the ground. It was an interesting area and provided some great views but after walking around the area for approximately three hours, we had all decided that we had seen enough limestone for one day.