Kunming Shi

Our 20 hour hard sleeper journey to Kunming was actually fairly pleasant, with comfy beds, unlimited hot water for superior Chinese pot noodle and friendly fellow passengers. On arriving at our hostel we were very surprised (especially as we had barely seen any westerners since leaving Hong Kong) to bump into the older brother of someone in our year at Fortismere - small world! We decided to take it easy after our long journey, so spent the morning wandering round Kunming, visiting a fairly arty cultural center and attempting to visit the Yunnan provincial museum, which had unfortunately been moved to a modern building far from the center of town.

In the afternoon, we hopped on a couple of buses to visit the bamboo temple, a beautiful Buddhist temple decorated by a madcap 19th century artist who filled it with statutes satirising his contemporaries and around 70 surfing buddhas.

We had dinner at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where we had delicious spicy noodle and fried bread, which unlike all the other baked goods we'd bought in China wasn't disgustingly sweet brioche.
It was Saturday night, so we headed to the Kundu night market, a major nightlife area. We walked past the cheesy, huge Chinese clubs and went for a quick drink in Mask, a bar recommended by lonely planet. The place had a cool vibe, but we were pleasantly surprised when a DJ whose music wouldn't be out of place in a cool Shoreditch club came on. We stayed there til 3, despite having a bus at 9am the next morning, encountering American exchange students, the daughters of Brazilian pilots and Chinese techno enthusiasts along the way.

We groggily caught the bus to Yuanyang, famed for its rice terraces the following morning. The journey took more than 8 hours through rolling, increasingly tropical hills, on a coach that got hijacked by a group of helpful Chinese tourists who were keen for it to stop closer to the terraces and our hostels than it was scheduled to, followed by a minibus crammed with 20 of us, a ride me and David enjoyed from the dashboard. We finally reached Belinda's guesthouse at around 8pm and, with the cook not speaking any English and there not being a menu, ended up massively over ordering, getting a giant pile of pork ribs each, at vast expense (£7). That evening we met 2 English blokes in the hostel, one of whom had been cycling from London to Australia and had visited many of the Central Asian destinations we are heading to, so could provide plenty of good stories and practical info.

We got up shockingly early for the sunrise over the rice terraces, but as you'll see in my pictures, it was very much worth it. We spent the day exploring the terraces, walking along them admiring the amazing landscape, visiting the villages of the local Hani people, as well as doing a bit of relaxing in the village we were staying in, before heading to another scenic viewpoint to experience a slightly cloudy, but still picturesque sunset. We spent the evening with our 2 English mates, enjoying a simple meal of fried rice while indulging in more Baiju than was wise for people with another early start the next day.

I am writing this from a train (cheaper and more comfortable than the bus) heading back to Kunming from a town near the rice terraces, which we would have only been able to find thanks to the help of a friendly middle aged Chinese woman with a bit of broken English. The train staff have also, like most people we've met, been very helpful, enlisting other passengers' smartphones to translate their warnings to keep an eye on our bags.

We are heading to Dali tomorrow morning, towards the mountains on the edge of the Tibetan plateau where we are hoping it won't be too cold/snowy.Read more