Day at the Stone Forest

July 17, 2013.

Today we were heading to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Stone Forest (石林) in Shilin county (90 km from Kunming) to see the limestone formations. It is one of the most important attractions of Yunnan. The buses to the karst stone forest left from the East 3 Ring Road bus terminal. We soon found the ticket counters at the terminal, where our translator app helped us to get the tickets in one minute! We forgot to ask though what it says on the tickets, where and when do the buses leave, so we tried to find someone who can help us. A man at the info counter spoke some English and pointed to the right direction.

The buses were supposed to leave every 40 minutes according to the internet, but when we found our bus (Stone Forest written in English on the sign) it was full, so we had to wait for another one. As the full bus left another one soon arrived. The buses leave when they are full, so the service is continuous. So we caught the second bus. The mighty internet had also said that it takes three hours to get to the Stone Forest by bus, but we reached it in 75 minutes! The three hours probably meant the local buses. Still, the buses are fast in China, although on longer travels they stop a few times for a break. Our bus drove straight to the Stone Forest, so no stops were needed.

Stone Forest hiding somewhere

The Stone Forest ticket area is a bit complicated. We walked a few hundred meters from the restaurant and bus area to find the ticket office. After getting the tickets we caught a minibus that was supposed to drive to the main gate, but they left us at a museum where we had to walk a few hundred meters more to reach the gate. This was a good warm-up for the Stone Forest which has seven scenic routes in the main area, some of them short and some quite long. Before you reach the area where the paths start you walk few hundred meters more.

First views of the Stone Forest, the main gate area.

The main gate area

Inside the park

The whole Stone Forest can be quite a labyrinth, but at the Major Stone Forest the routes actually pass through the cracks in the rocks and the cracks are in direct line. If there were no signs you would get easily lost though, as it still seemed like a puzzle with the paths twisting inside the lines and going through rocks and caves at times.

The Karst formations feed the imagination. Chinese love to create stories from these and name the formations.

Stone Forest is known since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 A.D.) as the First Wonder of the World

As you can see from the picture above, some of the stones have engravings in them. This made them look unnatural, although in many places the scenery is very surreal even without them. Many touristic places in China have been modified more than in other countries and this can either take out some of the magic of the place or create more magic to them. In some caves in China the lightshows can add atmosphere to the place though, but mostly it's disappointing to see people mess with what nature has created on its own.

The Stone Forest covers an area of 400 square kilometers (96,000 acres). The rocks can be 40 m high!

Wangfeng pavillion in the center of the park gives great views
around the area

One view from the pavillion

The Stone Forest was a shallow sea some 270 million years ago. Since it used to be underwater you can even find marine fossils, mainly in the Bushao Hill area. We found a few coral fossils. To find them you have to look carefully though.

Exposure to wind and running water shaped these
limestone ridges

From the five hours we spent in the Stone Forest we had two rests and walked a total of four hours. It was a lot of walking, we could tell it from our tired feet, they were jelly after three hours. There are some stairs in the forest, so you're not walking on level ground all the time. We still continued walking though and I'm glad we always do sightseeing the hard way, we saw so much more than the people who decided to just walk the main area or take the minibus that rides a circle inside the main area. If you take the minibus or only walk the main area you will miss out on a lot of different rock formations, environments and ambiences. We saw a few of the scenic areas, but as the Stone Forest actually stretches twenty kilometers out of this area we didn't have a chance to see it all. Some people also come here by bikes.

One of my favourites in the Major Stone Forest is the Sword Peak pond area. It is a peaceful and majestic place, where you can walk quite a bit. The area has bridges, so you can cross waters and this way see the area more. It is a very surreal place. The Stone Forest even has underwater caves, rivers and canyons. It would be great to explore those by doing cave diving, but it's not possible.

The "Critical Moment" rock

The Sword Peak pond. The end of the sword now lies in the pond. The signs don't say which one of these rocks is the sword. It could be the one on the right
with the top missing, with red engravings on it.

Sword Peak pond

We even found an area where the locals didn't go as it was too far away. The Eternal Mushroom and its surrounding areas (next to Lizi Yuanqing area) were peaceful from all the screaming, pushing and stressed out people. There are many beautiful spots and even two lakes with frogs and fish (hard to see them). We also saw a yellow-green snake and squirrels that made funny noises. The area is marked well with signs and you can find a few emergency phones. Again, the scenery is completely different from the areas before. Most of the rocks look like "baby" rocks, compared to the huge Major Stone Forest rocks.

Growing corn

A park worker offered us some small apples. They were very dry and quite tasteless.

Eternal Mushroom (Wannianlingxhi) scenic area

Eternal Mushroom scenic area

The Giant Mushroom is 15 meters high, larger on the top and small on the foot. It could be the one at the middle, zoomed from far.

Ancient rock engravings at the Lizi Yuanqing scenic area

The earliest images on the rock (picture above) were made before the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220), the middle ones are in relation to the original religion of Yi nationality in Stone Forest area and the later ones are probably made by the descendants. The images are of human, beasts, moon and stars.

The Lizi Yuanqing scenic area

To get this view to the circular road where the minibus travels you have to climb on top of the high sharp rocks

These rocks and their formations lead to temptation to climb them. One internet site mentioned that the Stone Forest used to have a few bolted routes for rock climbing, but they are now gone. The site adviced to bring your own bouldering gear, so maybe bouldering is still possible here. Makes you wonder though why climbing is allowed at a UNESCO World Heritage site, but then again this is China, where anything's possible. I personally wouldn't want to damage these rocks with new bolts, and the earthquakes do their own damages each year. We only climbed one spot (without gear), where others had also climbed and were very careful not to break anything. These rocks don't break by human touch though, but do wear through time.

Back at the Major Stone Forest

Sword Peak pond

The sharp formations

The Elephant, or Monkey on an Elephant

A Thousand Year Old Tortoise. You can see the turtle head in the upper middle part.

Another one of my favourite areas here is the Orchid Gorge (goes by many names). Somehow we had the luck of having it all to ourselves, so we could admire the beauty in peace and listen to the wind that blows through it. Some beautiful trees and flowers like orchids grow here and attract birds and other animals, but we only saw some birds.

The Orchid Gorge is the deepest gorge in the Major
Stone Forest. It is 70 m long, 5-8 m wide and 20 m
deep.

The Orchid Gorge has a serene feel

The Orchid Gorge

Every year, around the 24th and 25th day of the sixth lunar month, the native Sani people of the Yi minority gather in the Stone Forest to celebrate their Torch Festival. Visitors can enjoy for example the folk dances, songs and the wrestling competitions of the Sani youngsters. The Sani people also created a world famous love story about Ashima and the poetry has been translated into twenty languages. One of the rocks in the area is named after her.

Stone Forest (altitude 1500-1900m) belongs to Sub-tropical monsoon climate, laying at low-latitude mountain plateau, with an annual temperature of 16℃. May to October is the rainy season while November to April is dry season. The hottest month is July with average temperature of 20.8℃, while the coldest month is January with the average temperature of 8.2℃. We happened to have a nice day, with some clouds and it wasn't too warm. With weathers like these you can visit the park anytime. The caves can be cold though, if you stay too long in them.

End of tour

With so much walking we were so sweaty and tired when we came back to town. Taking the bus back was easy. We caught the second bus, they also left when they were full so we didn't have to wait long. Back at the bus terminal we tried to take a taxi and got the third one by showing a picture of a central hotel. Even though it wasn't our hotel we were going that way anyway. The Google map wasn't working this time so we had to use pictures and my notes. I also showed the driver my handwritten note "downtown" in Chinese and he understood it. Back at our hotel I also left another note to our cleaning lady before we left the hotel to get dinner. It's not easy for a beginner to write in Chinese and it seemed more like I was drawing than writing.

A few words about our hotel, the Royal Garden. We picked this hotel only because it was cheap at the time, although we had read the bad reviews about it. Our curiousity also got us there. The pictures showed a glorious hotel we had only twice stayed at before, so we wanted to experience that, even though we knew this hotel had seen its best days. We had to switch rooms immediately though because there was a heavy cigarrette stink, but the new room also smelled badly. The Chinese still smoke in every room even when it's not allowed.
The full carpet seemed like it had been through all the wars. I wondered what sort of life it might preserve inside, or more likely, it has a few corpses tucked in there. I kept my socks on just in case in the room. What was "most funny" about the room though was what we found from the bathroom. The lights above the sink seemed to have blood stains in them. We still kept the room though. The cooks were strange too. We didn't get breakfast although we arrived to the restaurant in time, they just didn't want to cook anymore. We were still quite happy with most of the staff, who at least tried to help us. These were just a few quirky things about the hotel, which is suitable for those a bit more adventurous at heart. And no, we didn't catch any disease from the carpet. The blood stains stayed at the bathroom though, even after the cleaning lady's visit.

At first glance Royal Garden hotel seems like a luxorious hotel, but it has
seen its best days.

Knowing what we were going to get we didn't stress
much about the smelly rooms with blood stains

Again, looks quite nice like this. The swimming pool was not in use though, it was full of trash.

A statue close to the hotel

Drowning children at the hotel fountain

The Royal Garden staff doesn't speak English

A stinky river runs below here

Beautiful statues close to the hotel

For dinner we ended up at Pizza Hut, because we were too tired to find anything better. The lines were terrible though. We could've ended up waiting for an hour if we hadn't met this Dutch guy who was waiting for a table too. He greeted us and as he soon got the table he asked us to join him and his Chinese girlfriends table. That was a nice gesture, things like these don't happen very often! We had a nice evening with them. They also guided us to the railway station to get tickets to Dali the next day and handled the tickets for us. The couple had just bought tickets for themselves for the same train to Dali. Afterwards they continued to a local Belgium bar, but we were too tired from the day to join them, so we agreed to meet at the railway station the next evening. We were travelling on a sleeper (night) train.

Sleeper train ticket from Kunming to Dali, with mid level beds.

UNESCO World Heritage site Luang Prabang

July, 2013

After the Vang Vieng adventures our next city, Luang Prabang, offered us culture and history in the North central Laos. The beautiful UNESCO World Heritage site with old French style buildings and the two rivers, Mekong and Nam Khan, crossing at the other end of the city center, is mainly a peaceful place. There's more to the city though than just its many Wats and French villas. If you have the time the nature also has a lot to offer and it's easy to keep fit here too.

The clean streets of LP with old buildings

Drying rice cakes on the streets

During our Laos trip we've seen the same tourists everywhere. People often travel the same routes here, either going from North to South or the other way round. That's how we made friends with our group, we all happened to travel the same way and our interests were the same, so it was easy to stick together.

Of the numerous hotels, guesthouses etc in the area we all eventually ended up staying at the same guesthouse in LP, as the other ones had some problems. One of them was very noisy due to the location close to the main street with most of the restaurants and bars. It was strange to notice some tourists partying in LP, as the city mostly attracts the culture and history buffs and not so much the younger crowd.

LP art

Beautiful door

One of the sights to see in LP is the Buddhist Alms Giving Ceremony, which is one of the most sacred Lao traditions. The idea of the alms giving is for the Buddhist monks to make merit and also to collect food for their one meal of a day. 200 monks depart daily at sunrise from their temples to gather their daily meal on the main street. The tradition dates back to the 14th century. Tourists bring their own offerings to the monks, which is usually food. We passed this, as we didn't feel like waking up so early. So far on most days of our travel we'd waken up at sunrise, which is the worst part of travelling. You always have to wake up early for a bus, a flight, for a dive, to be an early bird at an attraction...sometimes it just doesn't feel like a vacation when you're doing this.

The Dara night market is a nice place to go to if you want to buy souvenirs or eat. You find all sorts of local handicraft and good cheap food there, even veggie and vegetarian, and you can also taste some really good coconut cream filled little pancakes and chili filled dumplings. We had some tasty Indian food too.

Local handicraft. Angry Birds is a Finnish brand though.

The lovely owl bags. These are also sold in Thailand and Cambodia.

A funny sign in one restaurant

Night market's colourful veggie dishes

Night market's colourful veggie dishes

Coconut cream filled little pancakes

Fancy this in your dinner table?

Mt. Phousi, which rises some 150 meters above the city, offers great views over the city. The path up to the mountain starts from the main street, where the night market is held. The nearly 300 steps are pretty easy and fast to climb if you're fit. Again, it costs a bit to see the view, but it's worth it. From the mountain you can see the Nam Khan river and the surrounding mountains. A small stupa can be found at the top and the Buddhist temple Wat Tham Phou Si is on the way up.

View to LP from Mt. Phousi

View to LP from Mt. Phousi

Wat Chom Si stupa

Sightseeing in LP is really easy. The center is small and by following the main road Sisavangvong and the rivers you get to see a lot of the areas temples and French buildings. Walking in the city feels like travelling back in time, the city is like an open air museum.

Sightseeing next to the rivers. Young monks bathing in Mekong.

Serpentine Nam Khan river

Old cars of Laos

Haw Pha Bang temple at Royal Palace Museum area. The temple 
was built to house Laos’ most sacred Buddha image.

Surrounding views from the temple

Shrine inside the temple

Haw Pha Bang temple

Haw Pha Bang temple

Paintings inside Wat Pahowak, which lies at the base of Mt. Phousi. The paintings date back to 1860.

Wat Mai Suwannaphumaham (or Wat Mai/Wat May), built in the 18th century, has a large emerald Buddha statue inside.

Window detail

Coloured glass mosaic details

Wat Xieng Thong, a Buddhist temple, was built between 1559-1560 by the Lao King Setthathirath

In the back; Wat Xieng Thong main temple with the Tree of Life mosaic.
Red Chapel at front. Tripitaka library is just outside this picture. Just like the Red Chapel, Tripitaka Library (1828) is also covered with mosaic details
depicting scenes of local Lao daily life and traditions. The library
houses the three baskets of Theravada Buddhist scriptures.

Seventeen-element gilded Dok So Fa, which is believed to symbolize
the center of the universe, on the roof of Wat Xieng Thong

A gong inside Wat Xieng Thong

With so much temples in the area it's easy to get tired of them. You might want to have a break from them and head over to a massage from all the walking. We picked one massage place by the Mekong river on the second floor, which seemed nice with a very friendly staff. We went upstairs, changed clothes to what seemed like old mens pyjamas and waited for our masseuses. Sometimes you can pick your masseuse but here it wasn't possible, so we had to wait and see who was eventually going to take care of us.

Finally the masseuses arrived and we met an older woman with a young boy, who seemed like 12 years old. We were puzzled if he was one of the masseuses, as we'd never seen anyone that young working as a masseuse. We asked him and after he confirmed he worked here we found out he was going to massage me. I wasn't too comfortable with having a young boy massage me and even working, but they said it was ok. I asked the boy if he can do powerful massage, as I really needed one now. Again he confirmed, so they started working.

The boy gradually increased the massage strength and finally he was massaging me like he was a polar bear, throwing his crushing weight on me like a seal he was hunting. I thought about telling him to take it more easy, but then let him just crush me. I'm pretty good at handling bruising and pain, although it might not be a good idea to cope with pain in a massage, where a wrong technique can do serious damage to your body. I was overwhelmed by the strength this young boy had. He was like a baby on steroids. After he was done I had to ask him how old he is. We nearly dropped our jaws as he said he is sixteen! Well, he was still very young and very strong for his age, but needed to work on his technique though. I still prefer to have an older lady with years of practice behind her to work on my muscles. The next day I had some bruises all over my body, but felt otherwise better.

One of the best things to see in LP is the Kuang Si waterfalls, which we also wanted to see. It takes about 30 minutes to reach from the city. There are many waterfalls, ponds and nice paths to walk at and a Bear Rescue Centre is in the same area. We spent about half a day in the area.

Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue Centre
http://www.freethebears.org.au/web/Projects/Laos/

There were about five bears in the large encloser,
all energetic, playful and looking healthy

Playing with a log

Small part of the encloser seen here

Curious of tourists

Relaxing with a twig

A large, one meter tall fern

The ponds in Kuang Si area

Main pond area

Main pond

The ponds

Kuang Si waterfall. There are many different
sized waterfalls in the area

Kuang Si waterfall

Huge palm plant in the area

A huge banyan tree with a strangler fig around it

Our time in Laos was soon coming to an end. We had spent nearly a month here and the time had gone really fast. The few days in LP weren't enough to explore the city, but we couldn't stay here any longer, as we needed to continue onward to Luang Namtha and to China. Here our group again got smaller, as Tom and Florrie were the second ones to leave us after Tomoko. They continued to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the next day me, Kari, Steve and Jemma travelled to Luang Namtha. We also had to say goodbye to Julie that day, as she travelled to Siem Reap, Cambodia. It was strange to continue with just the four of us, as we'd grown into such a tight group during that month.

There aren't many beggars in LP

Star fruit growing wild

Next blog; Luang Namtha