We have visited Kunming several times before and it is one of our favourite cities in China; it is probably the place we would settle if we lived here. Known throughout China as “Spring City”, Kunming enjoys mild, comfortable weather all year round and is a green city with tree-lined streets and several public parks. It also has its own excellent food. Kunming is the capital city of Yunnan province known for its exotic ingredients and liberal use of fiery chilies, although it is easy to find excellent food that suits all tastes and levels of adventure. Kunming is a modern city, and only a few pockets of old Kunming with its characteristic red wooden buildings remain.
In the centre of town is Kunming’s Green Lake Park, a serene and pleasant place good for walking at sunset and in the evening. Hundreds of people do just that, and twice a week an English Speaker’s corner is also held on the lake’s edge where the crowd practices English language conversation with friends and strangers. After joining in one of these on a previous visit, we chanced upon a lakeside restaurant that featured slightly exotic dishes and was pulling in a big crowd of diners – always a promising sign. And we weren’t disappointed either. The menu was helpfully arranged with four dishes to a page, and photographs and English words to supplement the Chinese characters (although there seemed to be a few letters and words missing here and there). I was about to order Traditional Pork Balls when I noticed that the other three dishes on the same page were Fired onions and yaks penis (personally I felt this dish would have benefited greatly from a liberal garnish of fig leaves), Black pepper with cowboy bone (what??), and Vegetable chafing dish. My eyes watered, I blinked, straightened up in my chair and quickly changed the order to Wild Chicken with Bamboo Shots. For vegetables we ordered the Zen cultivating with bamboos. It was all hot, fresh and excellent, and we resolved to return as soon as possible. But there is such a wide choice of modern Chinese and western food options in Kunming that return visits might easily be few and far between.
We came to Kunming again late last Saturday night. On our return to Lijiang from Tiger Leaping Gorge earlier that day we were hoping to catch a bus to Chengdu in Sichuan province but we discovered that with Chinese New Year looming, all buses to Chengdu from Lijiang were booked out for the next 10 days. But we did manage to get a seat on the very next bus to Kunming that like Chengdu, is a major regional transport hub. According to a program on CCTV9, China’s English-language television channel, there will be more than 200 million passenger movements over the New Year’s holiday week, many of them very long-distance as migrant workers in the big eastern cities return to their own home towns and villages for the hugely important New Year’s family get-togethers and celebrations.
We have our own New Year’s date this year. Our Chinese friend and translator for the course I lecture in, Yajun, has invited us to come to her hometown and to be part of her family’s New Year’s celebrations. She works in Tianjin but hails from the city of Shaoyang in Hunan province about 1,000 km east of Kunming. Chinese New Year’s Eve is on 25 January and so we need to be in Shaoyang before that.
On Sunday we joined several thousand other people queued up at the Kunming Railway Station who were hoping to get train tickets to their own New Year’s destinations. There were about 40 temporary queues established in addition to the normal ticket lines at the station. Our turn at the ticket box eventually came and we emerged triumphant clutching two tickets for a train to Changsha, the capital city of Hunan province. We were lucky; there were few tickets left and the tickets we did get were for a different train from the one we were hoping to travel on and were for a later date than we were seeking. But our tickets will see us in Shaoyang before 25 January so these were inconsequential differences.
Many people had already begun their New Year's holiday and the streets were choked with taxis and buses, and people hauling cases and bags to and from the railway and long distance bus stations. The latter is directly below our room on the 22nd floor of the Yunnan King World International Hotel, a comically grandiose name for a modest hotel next to the railway and bus terminals. At one stage I counted 187 buses at the station below, with a constant stream of vehicles coming and going and much honking of horns to clear a path. This has continued for several days now, and on the streets it is difficult to move in the vehicle and human traffic jams although the atmosphere is festive and happy.
On Tuesday we spent a pleasant afternoon walking once again around the Green Lake and noticed that the Siberian Gulls which winter each year in Kunming were back, and many were flying in large circles around the lake’s perimeter to collect in mid-air the food thrown to them by visitors. We walked through a huge, crowded New Year’s market stocked with fresh, dried, salted, smoked and pickled produce, and on through the peaceful grounds of Yunnan University to a little alleyway we discovered on our first visit that has several excellent small cafes. Our favourite is the Bangkok that serves authentic Thai food. We ordered lemongrass pork, a whole fish liberally garnished with chilis, raw onion and mint, and steamed rice. Once again it was all excellent. Sadly, though, we wondered how much longer this quaint alleyway and its cafes will survive in their present form. The area has changed so much over the past few years and the similarly rustic shops in the next street have all been demolished and replaced with a line of modern shops, all of identical design. Progress no doubt, but at the expense of character and diversity.
Our few days here have passed quickly and our bags are now packed ready for tonight's departure on Train K338, scheduled to pull out of Kunming at 5.45pm.
