Site Report: Kunming - Xi Shan

Visits

• 2013-01-09: We arrived by train in Kunming, and we spent the evening walking around the huge outdoor pedestrian mall in the center. There was just about every store in the mall that you would find in, say, Minneapolis. We ate at some busy restaurant that featured squirming worm-like creatures in hot pots. After dinner, I left a tip on the table, but I guess that is not allowed as the busboy ran outside the restaurant to return the cash. The next stop was to get a haircut. Despite trying, I have been unable to pronounce words in Mandarin, so I basically just agree with any questions asked of me. And that is how my haircut turned into an hour long haircut/hair wash/more hair wash/scalp and shoulder massage... all for about $12. The next morning, we found a cab willing to charge us double the price to take us to the Xi Shan mountain park. Well, I think that is where we went as we were actually dropped off at some lake with another dreadful cable lift. No amount of pointing at Chinese characters in a translation book could convince the taxi driver that we actually intended to walk up the mountain. So, we got into the cable lift for the hair-raising trip halfway up the/a mountain where we encountered the coldest weather of the trip. The thing about China that is really fun is that if you think about something that you might want to buy, look around. You will probably see the item no matter where you might be standing. I was thinking about hot coffee. A few moments later, we encountered a small shop on the mountain that sold sweet corn flavored potato chips and something they called coffee but tasted more like evaporated milk. Upon finishing the coffee, I found that the bottom of the cup was full of some odd tasting sugary gelatin balls. Then, there was another guy selling actual sweet corn. Sorry, guy, I just had the corn flavored potato chips. So, we continued walking around on the freezing mountain when I thought about lunch and hats. We walked toward a cluster of houses on the outskirts of the park, and sure enough, there was a hat salesman. Among the hats was one that proclaimed "Yarn Breast!". As I perused the hats, a lady approached me and performed the universal eating-from-a-bowl-with-chopsticks gesture before leading us to her restaurant. After lunch and an entire pot of tea, we walked around on the mountain for awhile more. We somehow missed the main entrance and instead found ourselves on a bus travelling through some extra-dusty suburbs. After riding around on the bus for a couple of hours (days?), I realized that we were not heading toward the train station, but rather the airport. If you are trying to catch a train, I hope you aren't first trying to catch a taxi in Kunming rush hour. Anyway, after some negotiations between our hotel manager and the taxi driver, we were about to pay one third extra to actually ride in the taxi. The driver did not want to drive us because there was traffic. Note to Kunming entrepreneurs, if you don't like to drive in traffic, don't become a taxi driver. As it works, we made it to our train with ten minutes to spare!

Species Seen

Lifelists

• Asia
• World

Trips

• Around The World in 66 Days