Kunming, The Stone Forest and off the beaten track
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2007
1
42
58
Trip End
Oct 22, 2007
Kunming,
China
Sunday, October 14, 2007
I must say that the Chinese LOVE building roads and bridges. We drove on a four lane expressway all the way from the airport to the Stone Forest with surprisingly little traffic, especially for China.
Along the way Jack told us a beautiful story about his family. His grandfather had been arrested by Mao's Red Army as a "Capitalist Spy", his mother was forcefully sent by the Government to a school in the countryside at a young age and, when they met and fell in love, his parents were denied the necessary permission to marry by his boss. The years passed with thoughts of suicide by his mother and promises of an eventual wedding by his father and finally the downfall of Mao
Kunming Stone Forest
. Jack's grandfather was released from prison with compensation of RMB3,000, about £200 or US$400, the young couple were indeed married and now have two happy sons. How nice to hear such a happy ending!Jack told us that there are about 4 Million visitors to the Stone Forest every year. That means an average of about 11,000 people per day! We are constantly amazed and even overwhelmed by the numbers of people in this country. Considering that the Chinese population numbers in the region of 1.3 Billion people means that, on any given day, there must be millions of people travelling around the county. Staggering!!!
We got to the main area of the Stone Forest only to find what felt like an above average number of visitors day. "Not to worry", said Jack, "I am Harry Potter and can perform magic". He announced that he would take us through a gate whereafter we will be able to see the crowds but they would not be able see us. We dutifully followed him and, true to his word, after fighting our way through the crowds, we ended up in an area where, for a while, we were the only people amongst the stones. Although another two small Westerner groups also had guides with the "Harry Potter magic", it really was an amazing and magical experience to be so alone in all these stones.
The Stone Forest is just that, a vast open area littered with giant stones of all shapes, some strangely weathered away over hundreds of thousands of years. We were completely dwarfed by many of the stones and constantly seeing bigger or more amazing looking formations.
Kunming Stone Forest
After wandering through for a while, and taking the usual plethora of photos, we were walking along a path which was thinning of rocks. Annie asked where we were going, out to the car was Jack's answer. Sadly the Chinese way is often to rush through, take a few photos and leave, that's not us.
I noticed we had passed a path leading back towards other stony areas so suggested we go walking along that. It took us through more interesting rock formations before leading us into some farmlands. Jack was surprised at his "mad tourist" guests but started enjoying himself as we were taking him to an area he had not seen in all his visits to the Stone Forest.
The path dwindled away first to a ledge along the waterway used for irrigating the fields and then just to a narrow dirt path. We reached a sign in Chinese which Jack translated as "Tourists turn back!". This did not deter any of us and we continued through the farmlands of maize, rice, chillies, pumpkins and various other veggies with a path getting ever muddier. At one point Annie had to shake and dig some mud off her shoes as they were getting too heavy for her to walk :-) Finally we made it to a road that rumbled with work trucks, buses and a variety of other hooting local vehicles.
Jack phoned to arrange for our driver to meet us along this road. We found a place to clean, bang and scrape the mud off our shoes while our driver watched us in quiet bemusement.
Shoes cleaned, we headed back to Kunming with a quick diversion to a silk factory to see some "beautiful art"
Kunming Stone Forest
. They have still not learnt what bad shoppers Annie and I are. By the end of the visit we had learnt more about the owner, his family and his travels to London than we had paid attention to or bought any art.During our farmland expedition we had again surprised Jack by telling him we like spicy food. (None of our guides have been aware that Westerners eat and enjoy spicy food!) He did however respond in a great way; he suggested we, along with him and his girlfriend "Go Dutch" for dinner and go and eat some spicy local food together. We eagerly accepted and agreed on a time to meet.
Later we met up and Jack's manager, Martin, had decided to join us to see these weird foreigners. Jack's girlfriend, a teacher of Chinese to foreigners, understood but could not speak English and was a delightful young lady.
We went off to a restaurant which Jack had been recommended by his friends and where we were the first ever foreigners, much to the manager's delight.
We were served a VERY spicy meal with some sweet pumpkin fritters on the side to calm things down. Rice only comes right at the end of the meal. Well, it was delicious! Extremely spicy but seriously tasty. Hilariously it was too spicy for Jack but the rest of us were thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
Afterwards we were put into a taxi and instructions given to the driver to get us back to our hotel. What a great evening!
