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.

Kunming day 2: Xishan/Western Hills Forest Park

July 17, 2013.

Western Hills translates to Xishan (西山) in Chinese. We spent a nice day at the Xishan Forest park with amazing views to the city. We took a bus to the base of the park that has been hailed as "the four major scenic mountains of Yunnan", with the highest peak at 2507.5 meters above sea level. The park lies about 15 minutes away from the city at Western Hills and the lake Dianchi (Dian). To get to the top you take two cableway rides or one cableway and a bus. The main attraction is the Dragon Gate built in the Qing Dynasty straight to the cliff, where amazing views open down to the lake and the city. The area has a lot of pavilions, palaces, gardens, caves, everything from stone; paths, rooms, grottos, Buddhist figures, and also the Small Stone Forest and the grave of Nie Er (composer of China's national song).

The cableway rides offer great views to the surrounding areas and the park itself with the Small Stone Forest visible at the end of the ride. The rides don't take long, but if you're afraid of heights the second ride might be a bit more scary. It's a ski lift (chairlift) where your feet are dangling freely in open air, with only a bar keeping you from falling from the chair to the forest below. The gap between the seat and the bar was wide and I could've easily fallen through it. This might be a scary experience for some Chinese, as they're much smaller than me. The lifts had also seen their best days, so riding the rusty chairs had an own thrill to them.

First cableway ride across the lake Dian

Lake Dian

Second cableway ride with scenery to the city. This is the chairlift.

View to Guanghan pavilion

After arriving to the top we were handed photos of our ride on the chairlift. Before starting to explore the area we bought some potato snacks with spices and searched for a toilet. The toilet turned out to be horrific! In Chinese style it was just holes on the cement floor and the waste dropped straight down to the forest below! The toilets smelled like a waste factory, you didn't want to take too much time doing your business there.

The terrible "toilets" at the park.
Again, bring your own toilet paper!

You do a lot of walking in the park and there are also a lot of stairs, so don't come here wearing high heels. Wearing those anywhere seems to be popular among Chinese women though, as you see them in high heels even in national parks! They often wear beautiful dresses too. Mostly the younger women wear them, who probably dress up for the hundreds of pictures they're taking around every corner for the Chinese equal to Facebook, Renren. I thought the situation with mobile phones, selfies and Facebook was bad in Europe (people being glued to their phones all the time), but it's even worse in China!

A general map of the area. It doesn't cover everything.

Lingxu (Lin Xu) pavilion, where you get the wider
view of the area.

View from the pavilion. The area had a lot of dragonflies.
This picture captured just a few of them.

View from the pavilion to the city

View down to the lake, while descending to the Dragon
Gate. The drop down is several hundreds of meters!

Descending to Tiantai platform

View from the Tiantai platform.

Dragon Gate, the symbol of good luck. Those who enter here will become successful and famous. 

The 66.5m long Dragon Gate Grottoes is carved on the cliff of Western Hill between 1781-1853.

The grotto includes Jiushibao, Luoxuandao, Ciyun and
Yunhua Temples and Datian Pavilion. The path is narrow
and low.

Typical path at the grotto. Good for Chinese size and me.

Rock carvings

Another beautiful pavilion

One of the gates to walk through while descending

Datian pavilion

Datian pavilion

Datian pavilion wishing well

Wishing well from inside

Serene exit with bamboo forest

Stones for sale

You can easily spend the whole day at the park, as it's so big. We only walked the other side of the park and spent a few hours there. We missed the grave of Nie Er and all the temples on the other side. The battery bus back to the main gate passes all of the temples, so you can hop off from the bus if you like and walk to the temples. I'm not sure though if you can catch the bus from the road again when you're heading back. It was hard to find out about anything, as all the people we met only spoke Chinese. Near the main gate we switched busses back to the city. Luckily a young woman was able to help us out in English here, we didn't even get to ask for help before she offered it. She told us which bus to take and how much to pay for it. There are some bad advices on TripAdvisor about these busses, so be careful, some of the busses only take you halfway back to the city.

Heading back to the city in a nice bus

We hadn't been eating too well in China so far. The last three days it was just pizza and McDonald's, stuff we don't eat too often back home, so my body was in shock. It was hard finding decent food, when the internet didn't work all the time to search for restaurants and you couldn't ask for advice from just anyone. You couldn't use the internet cafes either, as they asked for Chinese identity cards. On our earlier visit in China years ago it was still possible to use the internet cafes with just showing your passport. When we finally found an Indian restaurant we were very happy. The Cacaja Indian restaurant can be found in many cities in China. They had many familiar dishes. We liked at least their banana lassi, pakora (the veggies were cooked) and paneer (the spinach was better than normal).

Cacaja Indian restaurant on Zhengyi Road. You can find Cacaja from many
cities in China.

The dishes don't look too good, but they were very tasty

Later we explored Kunming more and saw the Old Kunming quarter and also found the Bird and Flower Market area, where they also sold other stuff. I was curious to see how healthy the animals were. One dog had a mild eye infection, but the other animals were in good health. The dogs were social and I was so happy to pet a samoyed, a rottweiler, a husky and some rabbits and guinea pigs, and see budgies as well singing their hearts out and sharing some love to each other. It was very nice to see some animals during this long trip and it was even nicer to see that not all animals are treated badly in China. We did see some cages and terrariums though which were too small for the amount of animals stuffed in them. Hopefully they are sold fast from those conditions.

The Old Kunming quarter

The Old Kunming quarter

The Bird and Flower Market. Poor birds have little space.

The Bird and Flower Market. Some of the terrariums and cages were way too crowded.

Greeted by this good looking fellow

The normal market next to the Bird and Flower Market

Sisters building close to the Victory Monument on Guanghua Street

Looks like a police car. They use several car models.

Colourful baskets sold near Zhengyifang Shopping Center, near Guanghua Street.

Street market near Zhengyifang Shopping Center.

An old man was selling huge stones at one street and he didn't like it at all when I took a photo of his stones. He started yelling, so I disappeared fast from the scene. He wasn't even in the picture. We noticed that some sellers don't like their products photographed. Maybe they're afraid that people steal their ideas or they're selling illegal stuff, but I just like to photograph everything for fun.

Selling stones. The seller is not in the picture.

Swords and other weapons

We actually walked a lot today, but that's normal for us. We walked quite randomly as we didn't have a map of the center. Later we found someone sharing maps, but he decided to pass us and gave maps to the Chinese people. We didn't bother to run after him. This was another example of how foreigners are ignored in China, many people avoid contact with tourists, especially the taxi drivers. Some were of course delighted to even get to speak a few English words with us, like this student that we bumped into earlier near our hotel. He asked for permission to join our table at a restaurant just to get a chance to speak English and his English was even better than some of the native speakers! Later he asked though if he could be our Kunming guide for free, but we declined the offer. Maybe it was one of the many hoaxes done in China, where you're later asked for money for some cause, but even if he just wanted to help us we didn't want to tag along to a guide. He might've also just wanted to speak English with someone and we talked at least half an hour with him. There was also this old man at the Cui Hu lake earlier we sat next to on a bench, who kept staring at us, and as we left we could've sworn he said "so long". But then again he might've also cursed us into hell in Chinese for all we know!

Jinbi square

Jinbi square

We found a movie theater too. When we don't have nothing better to do at evenings during travels we sometimes go to movies. You might think why do something as ordinary like that when you're at a new exciting place, but on our travels we've found out that even a simple thing like going to the movies abroad can be quite a thrill. The best experiences about movies abroad have been at the Crete island (Greece), Morocco, Thailand and the island of Madeira (Portugal).
The Crete island had an outdoor movie theater, where the loud grasshoppers were making their own soundtrack to the movie and as there was no roof we could also watch the night sky and stars at the same time and smell the night air. It was definitely exotic and even more so, regarding that we were watching Bram Stoker's Dracula under a night sky!
The movie theater in Agadir, Morocco, was a very old one. It was very run-down and burnt all over and the balcony looked like it might collapse any minute, but we still stayed there. The seats were also burnt with cigarrettes. We went to watch some combat movie that had attracted the cinema full of teenage boys, who enthusiastically played along to the movie from start to finish, with kicks and all. We could hardly watch the movie, as it was so exhilarating to watch the boys do their stunts and pretend they were the martial arts stars. What comes to the experiences of Thailand and Madeira movies, well, let's just say Madeira theaters back then attracted the lovers, and in Thailand you have to pay respect for the (now deceased) King by standing up to a national anthem played for the King before the movie. These are just a few examples to show that going to the movies might not be an ordinary experience after all.

We went to see if they had the After Earth -movie (Will Smith) running with original language. It took a while to get the cashier to understand what we wanted - we now used a cell phone translator app - but we soon got the tickets we wanted. The theater seemed quite new and the sound system was very loud! There were only four people besides us and nobody spoke a word during the movie. We whispered some. Besides that the only sounds came from the movie. Nobody was even eating, or spitting, how perfect was that! It felt kinda strange though that nobody had snacks with them, because you're used to people bringing snacks to the movies at least in Finland, where this behaviour is very normal. The theater had a strong air condition, which is normal in Asia, so I had brought a long shirt with me to keep warm. I've never understood it why all the public places in Asia are kept even colder than what we have in the Western countries. We are, after all, more used to the cold than the people here. Even the locals have complained about the coldness to me. The movie was good, although I had more expectations from it what comes to the title. I had already imagined a whole bunch of scenes that could happen with a title like that and this time my imagination was more exciting than the movie.

Kunming cinema

After the movie we tried to take a taxi to our Royal Garden hotel, which is well known in Kunming and only three kilometers from the city center. This time we actually got lucky fast, as the second taxi stopped for us. We had the hotel card with us (written in Chinese) and we showed it to the driver. These Chinese cards help out a lot. The next morning it wasn't as easy as this, when about six taxis declined us. We we're heading to the Stone Forest with local busses.

The funny translations you see in China

Next blog: Stone Forest (Shilin, Yunnan, China).