China - Kunming 2

June 14: rock forest and tourist traps.

June 14 morning:

We take a long bus ride out to see the "Rock Forest". They're natural formations, but the grounds in the main tourist areas are so well kept that it looks like a garden.

Every time we turned a corner, the tour guide would claim some new rock totally looks like some historical or mythological (those things can become pretty hard to tell apart) figure. This is one of the more famous ones:

...but I don't remember who it's supposed to be. Some woman?

The other popular thing to do in these parts is to throw little pendants (with ribbons) onto whatever flora manages to grow on the rocks:

It's kinda pretty to see a little tree decorated like this. But multiply it by a horde of tourists and you get infestations like this:

There are ponds in some areas with koi! We think they're pretty cool:

Here is a different kind of fish:

...taking a picture of these incredibly purple flowers that grow everywhere:

It really is a beautiful place. Some more pictures of rocks:

...and the stalwart plants that manage to grow on them...

...and the various textures that can be found etched into the rock:

The tourist area we walked through is only a small part of the area. These rock formations extend for quite a ways around:

But lest it seem too idyllic, with nary a soul in the above photos, let us remind ourselves that this is China:

Besides the crowds, though, it really wasn't that bad. There were a couple of these stalls selling random unrelated things...

...but they were generally few in number.

June 14 afternoon:

Long bus ride back to the city. Tour guide was telling us about the 5 big trade routes through Yunnan, color-coded for ease of remembering:

• White: heroin and other drugs
• Black: guns
• Red: we thought it was going to be exports of Communism, but it turned out to be the French-built Yunnan-Vietnam railway, red because of the workers who died building it
• Yellow: Gold, silver, copper, tin, and lead. Tobacco may have also been somewhere on this list.
• Green: Jade

Wow! I really was not prepared for this kind of a history lesson.

Then the tour guide went into why jade is awesome (it makes you live longer, and also she totally has a friend whose wrist got run over by a bus but was okay because she was wearing a jade bracelet), why Kunming is the best place to buy jade (it's mined in southeast Asia, but worked in Kunming), and wow, would you look at that, we just so happen to be stopping at a jade factory!

Silver was also touted for its antimicrobial activity (though it seems to me that you'd get the same benefit at a fraction of the cost with silver plating vs. solid silver). There were a number of anecdotes involving silver being a cure-all for various seemingly-intractable diseases. One procedure involves a hard-boiled egg, with silver inside, rolled around on the patient's body.

The last item we were encouraged to buy is a pixiu. SC and I had never heard of it, so when the tour guide started describing this animal with no anus (which is supposed to bring you fortune because food goes in and never exits, therefore it must be a basin of attraction for wealth?), we were very perplexed trying to figure out what she must be talking about. Some kind of jellyfish or sea anemone? A planaria? What creatures have an incomplete digestive system? We eventually learned it's a mythological creature, some kind of eternally-constipated dragon offspring.

Anyways, the bus stopped for good amount of time at this particular tourist trap. Big selection of jade and silver goods. I like that they eventually stop putting in the extra zeroes in the price, and just start reporting it in units of 10,000's. SC and I didn't buy anything, but I took these pictures:

 There was a pretty extensive flower garden outside:

I took those last two pictures with the iPhone. Despite the wide angle lens (28mm equivalent), it makes a pretty good macro lens if you can get within a couple cm from your subject.

There was a pretty pond:

with a ton of fish:

The fish can definitely see out of the water. We got some interested fish come our way just by sitting on the side of the pond. Some girl had a little pendant (the kind people were throwing into trees at the rock forest) and the fishes swarmed around her when she waved it around.

In the middle of the pond is a man-made island (accessible by bridge) with a smaller pool containing fish fry, turtles, and lily pads:

Our last stop was a store that sold tea. We had a tea tasting, where the "cooked" pu-er tea was touted for its "bodily ventilation" properties. We were also encouraged to dump out any leftover tea onto the table surface in between teas, which I found amusingly antithetical to the concept of coasters.

June 14 evening

After a tasteless dinner with the tour group, we were dropped off at the train station with four hours to kill before our overnight train. We paid to sit in the first-class waiting room, which had outlets and comfortable chairs. Although nominally a non-smoking area, there were still a lot of smokers. I usually don't mind it so much, but in this situation it really started to wear on us.

On the train, we had hard bunks (triple bunked beds). The lowest one has enough room to sit up on, but the upper ones are purely for sleeping. They're actually pretty comfortable, but there isn't a door, so you don't have privacy and have to be a little more careful with your stuff.