A Day Trip to the Spectacular Stone Forest, Kunming, China

We signed up and paid for a one day bus tour and needed to be at the bus station to board the bus at 8am. It was raining all night and when we got up, it was still raining. In fact the weather forecast that it would rain all day and everyday for the rest of the week in the region. We were agonizing whether we should call the tour company and cancel our trip booking. But the tour company assured us the trip would go ahead with about 20 other toursits. It was not an easy decision as we were concerned about our safety and that the roads might be slippery creating a driving hazard. I prayed quietly myself and felt a snese of peace so I agreed with Y. not to cancel the trip since we already paid a deposit of 100 yuens.

I looked forward to the day trip to Stone Forest ( SHILIN). Since our hotel didn’t offer breakfast, we bought some take out – 3 boiled eggs and 3 buns from the mom n pop shop next to our hotel. We were fortunate that when we got to the assembly place the bus was still there so off we went. As the tour bus drove out of Kunming the weather started to clear up. Prasie God! We had a Yunnan lady tour guide on the bus explaining to us the customes of the Yunnan people. Throughout the two hour bus ride, she gave us good information on various things. After we arrived at the Stone Forest, our bus tour guide handed us over to a local Yunnan guide dressed in his Yunnan costumes. I never heard of the Stone Forest and was surprised to learn that it has been desingated as an UNESCO Geo museum. The Stone Forest Park is a huge park. I saw for the first time how China handle its huge crowds on its public transportation systems and how passengers lining up and going through the train and subway gates etc., the system is amazingly efficient at dealing with huge crowds!

The Stone Forest is quite unique, I have never seen anything like this, with huge boulders jetting up from the ground in various sizes, shapes and with crevices in between these huge rocks. I remember visiting the Grotto in northern Ontario. The Grotto is nothing comparing to the Stone Forest. Things that stood out for me: 1. The spectacular beauty of this natural scenery – never in my life could I imagine I would see something so unique and breathtaking! 2. The huge number of visitors to this site – we have travlled in many different parts of the world. The most crowded place we ever seen was this place and Tokyo. 3. The Stone Forest was clean, well managed and the visitors to this place were well behaved. I didn’t see too much littering, empty bottles lying around etc. Pleasantly surprised! We finished our walking tour of the Stone Forest in a couple of hours, having seen only a fraction of what it has to offer. We met our bus guide back and she took the group tour passengers to a nearby restaurant for a lunch and this concluded our tour.

After more than an hour and half bus ride, we were dropped off at the Pedestrain Market where we did some shopping and tasted the different famous Yunan teas. But Y. thought we should not buy the tea there until we shopped around more and see if this type of tea could help with my insomnia. For dinner, we dined at the local vegetarian restaurant serving diners the various local grown mushrooms as the main course. It was our very first mushroom hot pot dinner. It was surprisingly delicious! One of the servers was very friendly to us and we chatted with her quite a bit. We found out that she was a university student working part time to support herself. We were happy to learn that Chinese young people could find part time employment to support their higher education as this was not common years ago. A good thing for the young Chinese! The young people exchanged their wechat no. Hopefully they would keep in touch and we wish this nice hardworking young lady all the best. We went back to our hotel, relaxed and watched cctv for a while, enjoying the positive reporting about the military and its people. I went to sleep at around 12pm sleeping like a baby! RT, Kunming, China 08012023