Wonderful karst formations

People i met here, who contributed to and improved my trip: Juliana (Russia)

We took a day trip out to the Stone Forest in Shilin, not expecting too much as we had heard a couple of grumbles regarding ticket prices and too many tourists. Upon arrival, I thought our fears would be confirmed as it had a slightly false feel and had become a little too developed within the rock formations, for my liking.

However, after wandering off down some small pathways, we soon found wonderful walkways and formations and better still, complete solitude. We meandered up, down and around for a couple of hours, getting lost amongst some fascinating creations of nature. I wasn’t too sure why other people had not wandered down these ‘lesser’ pathways, but I was delighted that they hadn’t.

Eventually we decided it was time to begin heading back to Kunming, but the prospect of what Lonely Planet described as ‘restaurants specialising in duck next to the bus stop’ sounded too good an opportunity to pass up. What our restaurant specialised in, was walking down the road, buying a luke warm duck from a road vendor, bringing it and hacking it up in front of us, then putting it on a plate! What a waste of time and money. We always seem to have bad luck with duck, so we ate what we could and decided that duck would be off the menu for the foreseeable future.

We got back to Kunming in the afternoon and searched for an Internet connection that loaded something other than Chinese pages, but couldn’t find one. We were eventually told that the reason we hadn’t been able to access anything was because of an earthquake in Taiwan earlier in the week. It seemed a little strange people who had been in other cities had encountered few problems. Also some opening pages flashed up ‘Kunming Internet Security Police’ pages, which made us wonder if there was something a little more suspicious….. after all, even the bbc pages don’t load in China. Censoring gone mad perhaps? On the plus side, we collected our passports complete with Vietnamese visas, thus confirming our future travel plans!