Kunming

Day 298 (April 22, 2019) - Kunming, Yunnan Province, China

Kunming was our first stop on our tour of Yunnan Province. Kunming is quite a far distance from Yangshuo. We started off on a slow train from Yangshuo to the larger city of Guilin, where we changed to a high-speed train to take us the six or so hours west to Kunming.

On the train again. There is always hot water available on trains so Travis picked up an insulated travel mug to make tea.

Kunming is located up in the mountains and the train ride there was incredible. It wasn’t just the mountain scenery either. China gives the term “rapid development” a whole new meaning. It seemed like every few minutes we were passing by newly constructed cities and blocks of skyscrapers. The Chinese apartment high rises were very iconic because we never saw just one of them. They are always built in groups of twelve or twenty perfectly identical buildings all next to one another. It was hard to tell if the cities grew up from small towns that had already been there or if the cities was built from the ground up with nothing there to begin with. I say this because it was hard to tell if anyone actually lived in them yet. Granted, we were flying past all these places at warp speed, but I could see grand eight-lane avenues cutting through the center of town but I never saw a single car driving on them. Strange, right? I thought maybe they were being built with the anticipation of people moving into them but that currently there weren't too many inhabitants.

I never got a picture of the construction projects we passed. I was too busy gawking out the window and forgot to take any pictures. But this is one I took while we were travelling parallel to a highway for a bit.

The number of infrastructure projects we saw was astounding. It seemed like every mountain valley had a new highway or a new high-speed train line being built and running off into the distance. Not small highways either. Huge six-lane highways were being built out here. What was most incredible was that these highways and train lines were being built through mountains. The land wasn’t flat and high-speed train lines need to be straight, so everything was being built with repeating patterns of tunnels and bridges that cut straight across the earth. It just looked like all these structures were floating out there as they cut in and out of the mountains and slowly curved their way across the landscape. I could never imagine construction projects of this magnitude and scale back at home.

Kunming at night while we were waiting for a taxi to our hotel.

When we arrived, Kunming seemed like a nice place. It was a sprawling, affluent city with high-rises everywhere and it all looked new and shiny because the sun finally decided to make an appearance. The weather was gorgeous. It’s knows as China’s city of eternal spring. It’s at a tropical latitude but it’s also over a mile high in elevation so the temperature is nearly always pleasant. Unfortunately, I never saw much of Kunming other than our hotel room. I blame the beer fish we had in Yangshuo; but whatever the cause, I was horribly sick the whole time we were there.

A small temple in Green Lake Park.

I only left the hotel a couple times in two days, but we did manage to see a tiny bit of the city. We first went out to try and find lunch. I wasn’t hungry but I thought that a small vegetable soup might make me feel better, so we found a restaurant to have lunch at. Travis ordered a tofu dish and I ordered what I thought looked like a mixed vegetable soup. I couldn’t believe my eyes when they brought the soup over. It was served in a bowl big enough to feed a dozen people. I only wanted a tiny cup but instead got the whole pot. And what was worse was that it tasted awful. It was some sort of sour broth that was not at all what I needed for my stomach. I had a ladle-full or two and that was all I could stomach. Travis helped a little, but we still left with the soup looking untouched. I felt bad leaving it, but I also wasn’t about to finish it.

The ridiculously enormous soup I ordered.

After lunch we managed to do a small bit of sightseeing and visited Yuantong temple, a Buddhist temple that has been around for a long time. The temple was originally constructed in the 9^th century, although it has since been resorted and expanded many times, but it still caries a lot of history. The temple was painted in bright and bold colors. It was a very nice place to walk around. Afterwards we opted for a cab back to the hotel rather than walking.

Yuantong Temple.

I stayed in bed pretty much the whole next day, but Travis went for a walk and saw some of the nearby sights, including the East and West Pagodas. I was feeling slightly better at dinner time and for the first time in as long as I could remember I actually wanted McDonald's. I didn’t want any noodles or dumplings or anything that reminded me of Chinese food. I wanted something familiar and the only thing I could think of was McDonald’s, so that’s where we went for dinner. On the walk there we passed by a few of the places Travis had seen earlier in the day, so I got to see them too in the end.

One of the pagodas.

Well, our time was up. So much for seeing much of Kunming. I was feeling better and almost back to normal on the day we had to leave. We were again boarding a high-speed train that was going to take us further up and into Yunnan Province to the town of Dali.