Shaoyang & Loudi, Hunan province, China

We left Train K338 three stops short of Hunan’s capital Changsha at the industrial city of Loudi. There we were met by Yajun’s cousin and her family who showed us to a local train about to leave for Shaoyang where we arrived two hours later, about 24 hours after leaving Kunming. On our arrival, Yajun’s parents took us out to dinner and the next day, after a very nice home-cooked lunch in their apartment in the city centre prepared by Yajun's mother, we walked around the nearby streets and parks, the latter decorated with red lamps strung between the trees. Chinese New Year was imminent and the streets were thronging with shoppers doing their last minute stock-up, similar to Christmas Eve in Australia. According to Yajun, I am only the 19th “westerner” ever to have come to Shaoyang. Certainly, judging from the stares of passers-by, foreign faces are not common on these streets. But as everywhere in China, the shopkeepers and hotel staff were friendly and welcoming.

On 25 January, the eve of Chinese New Year, we all travelled to Loudi where Yajun’s extended family was gathering for the imminent celebrations. Family members had come from near and far, and everyone stayed in consecutive rooms at a hotel near the city centre. There followed two solid days of feasting, drinking, talking, mahjong, poker etc. One room had been set aside as a common room for the cards, mahjong and general partying and when anyone wanted a break they could retreat to their own room for a short rest before getting the call for the next meal in the dining room downstairs. The wintry weather was conveniently conducive to all of this with early morning snowfalls and low temperatures not encouraging anyone to venture too far out. The breakfasts, lunches and dinners were a showcase of Hunanese cuisine with many and varied dishes, punctuated with frequent toasts of welcome, thanks and Xin Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year) throughout the room.

At midnight on 25 January Loudi exploded into a blaze of ear-popping, colorful fireworks across the city as every boy and girl over 8 it seemed lit up their formidable arsenal. Top honours went to the local steel plant that put on a big display, but many households also seemed to be unleashing their own heavy duty rockets and coloured showers. The doormen downstairs ignited a metre-diameter coil of what seemed like 1,000 fat bungers just outside the lobby. We were out in the car park watching the 360-degree show and when the bungers were finally spent we could barely make out the lobby through the haze. It sounded like the city was under bombardment and at one stage a fire truck rushed past with lights flashing, no doubt to attend to someone’s great pyrotechnic moment gone horribly wrong.

It was a helluva show and we felt very fortunate to be included in the celebrations and to be made so welcome. Chinese people sure know how to put on a party!

Xin Nian Kuai Le from Hunan!

Kunming, Yunnan province, China

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.

Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan province, China

The Yangtze River begins as a small stream on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, commencing a journey of over 6,000 km across China and ultimately emptying into the East China Sea near Shanghai. Along the way, fed by 700 tributaries, it grows ever larger into one of the world’s great rivers, directly supporting a population of 350 million people who live along its banks and floodplains.

Within Yunnan province, between Lijiang to the south and Shangri-la to the north, the Yangtze has only just begun its long eastward journey when it enters a narrow gorge created by the meeting of the Haba Mountain Range with Yulong XueShan (“Jade Dragon Snow Mountain”). This is Tiger Leaping Gorge, 20km long and 13,000 feet high from the river to the snow-capped peaks above.

We had hoped to see the Gorge on our previous trip through here in September 2007 when we were on our way to Tibet via Shangri-la. But a landslide had closed the Gorge road making it inaccessible. This time though, all roads were open and last Wednesday we took a bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou at the western end of the Gorge. We spent the night at Jane’s Tibetan Guesthouse and had dinner just down the road at the Gorged Tiger Café owned by an Australian woman Margo who came here 12 years ago and never left. We set off the following morning leaving our bags at Jane’s. The earliest stage of the hike is the hardest, rising along 34 steep switchbacks over two hours to an incredible view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on the opposite side of the Gorge, towering over the Yangtze River far below.

We were shadowed from Qiaotou by a horseman who was obviously hoping that we would hire his horse to carry one or both of us up over the steep section. He was a pleasant man which was just as well because he insisted on following us just a step behind. His horse was fitted with bells that jingled pleasantly as we sweated and strained our way up the switchbacks. Eventually it became clear to us, and to the horseman too, that we were going to make it to the top on our own legs and the horseman forlornly turned his pony and headed back down towards Qiaotou, finally leaving us to continue alone.

We stopped for an excellent lunch at the Naxi Guesthouse, and after several more hours of walking along the undulating path high up on the northern face of the Gorge, we came to the Tea-Horse Guesthouse where we hoped to find a bed for the night. Just before reaching Tea-Horse we were overtaken by a horse-train of Korean tourists rushing down the path on their ponies in a cloud of dust and crescendo of clip-clops, bell-jangling and excited chatter. We guessed they were headed for Tea-Horse too which didn’t augur well for our chances of getting a room. But we were lucky; there was one room left and what’s more it had the feature we value the most in a Chinese hotel; an English-style toilet. It also had the luxury of an electric blanket; something we never normally use but that was heavenly that night given the biting cold air. The food and company of the Koreans and the few other tourists at the Tea-Horse was pleasant and everyone was blown away by the incredible “in your face” sunset view across the Gorge to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

We continued eastward next morning along a descending path that was sometimes little more than a metre wide carved into the sheer hard rock cliffside, and crossed by waterfalls. Mid afternoon we arrived at Sean’s Guesthouse at Walnut Garden deep in the Gorge and at the end of the trail. We checked in and ordered some food on the balcony with a mind-blowing, intimidating view across the abyss to a sheer mountain face a thousand feet high. Photography was useless here to capture the vastness and grandeur of this sight. In the visitors’ book several hikers had written that Tiger Leaping Gorge had a bigger impact on them than the Grand Canyon. It’s certainly one of the greatest sights we’ve seen and possibly the most enjoyable hike we’ve done. We stayed at Sean’s for two days soaking up the views and we hiked down to the bottom of the Gorge to stand at the edge of the Yangtze waters surging through the Middle Rapids.

Amazingly the Chinese have blasted a narrow road into the north face of the Gorge not far above the river and it’s now possible to travel through by vehicle (that is, when landslides have not made the road impassable). We used this route on Saturday to return to Qiaotou in a minibus. It was a hairy trip, more hazardous than hiking the relatively safe high trail far above. The road has no guard rails in places and is occasionally unsealed due to past landslides. But none of this stopped our driver from overtaking on bends!!

Safely back in Qiaotou we collected our bags at Jane’s and went down to Margo’s to say goodbye. We shared a minibus back to Lijiang with a Finnish man and French woman who had also just returned from stunning Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Lijiang, Yunnan province, China

From Tengchong we travelled north, changing buses after 5 hours in Dali, then continuing further north to Lijiang. Lijiang is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the whole of China and in the summer months it's like Hahndorf on steroids. But it's much more sedate at this time of year. There's a lot to see and do in the Lijiang area and we spent several great days here in September 2007. This time though we're just passing through, to attend to some unfinished business with Tiger Leaping Gorge further to the north.

But this afternoon we did spend a few pleasant hours strolling around the World Heritage Listed Lijiang Old Town Centre. Established 800 years ago on the route linking Sichuan with Tibet, the old town has retained much of its traditional character despite the ravages of time, the influx of tourists and a few strong earthquakes. The shops and cafes are now entirely tourist-oriented and loaded with trinkets, but the buildings themselves, the maze of narrow granite cobblestone streets, and the town as a whole remain very beautiful. And vehicles are banned from the old town centre which adds greatly to its appeal. Open channels carrying fresh water run along the edge of the streets; these and numerous associated water features add further to the streetscape atmosphere, as does the colourful traditional dress of the Naxi women who walk the streets hawking fresh local produce and rest in the beautiful market square when their work is done.

Tengchong, Yunnan province, China

North of Ruili lies the Gaoligong Mountain Range, the western side of which receives few visitors. That’s a pity because the area surrounding the small rural city of Tengchong has many interesting sights and it’s surely only a matter of time before this region becomes a hot item on the Yunnan tourist trail. We crossed Gaoligong Shan by bus from Ruili on a very scenic route that passed through dense natural mountain forest interspersed with stands of bamboo, pine, sugar cane and bananas. It was a fascinating eight hour trip on a small bus marred only by the number of chain smokers on board. When we boarded the vehicle in Ruili, it was one of a line of buses parked in a neat row at the station, with the front of each bus bearing the name Neoplasm. At least that’s how I initially read it, but on closer inspection I saw that the word was actually Neoplan. But given the number of smokers on board and the cacophony of early morning sniffling, snorting, spluttering, sneezing, wheezing, coughing, hawking and spitting going on, Neoplasm Busline would have been a truer description. Fortunately we had control of a window that we opened often to let in some fresh mountain air that kept the atmosphere inside tolerable (just). We stopped for lunch in a small village where most of the roadside shops were stocked with machetes and knives, presumably for use in the canefields or as decorative items in local houses.

In Tengchong we checked into the Hongliang Hotel in the main shopping street. This proved to be an excellent choice as the Hongliang turned out to be the best value for money Chinese hotel we’ve ever stayed in. We strolled around some of the back streets in the vicinity to see the last remaining red-painted timber buildings that will all be gone within the next year or two, to be replaced no doubt with brick and concrete edifices.

Tengchong’s biggest attraction for visitors is the 800 square kilometre Tengchong National Geological Park. This region is seismically active, having experienced on average one earthquake over 5 on the Richter scale every 7 years for the past five centuries! The earth’s crust in this area is only about 40km thick, and molten magma lies only about 7km below the surface in places. The Indian and Euro-Asian tectonic plates collide here, and the resultant massive underground forces are the cause of all the earthquakes and other geological phenomena observed in the area. Within the Geo Park there are 97 currently dormant volcanoes and over 120 hot springs, many of them boiling.

On Wednesday we visited the Sea of Heat, a collection of hot springs and geysers in the Park. Amongst all the bubbling and steam there were some highly-coloured surface deposits created by the evaporation of hot waters laden with sulphurous and silicate minerals. And the Frog Mouth Geyser, a small set of continuously shooting steam and boiling water jets issuing from short spouts formed from a black and green mineral deposit was fabulous.

We returned to the Park on Thursday to see a few of the 97 volcanoes, dormant for the past 3,000 years which is quite a short time geologically speaking. We climbed to the top and walked around the rim of the Big Empty Volcano. This afforded great views of the Small Empty Volcano to the right, and the Black Empty Volcano to the left. The other 94 volcanoes have similarly evocative names. Then we hired a driver to take us 20km to the eastern edge of the Park to see the Columnar Joint. The ride there was rough and bumpy over a winding, dusty, undulating cobblestone road made of volcanic rock. It must have been murder on the tyres. The trip felt like we were on safari but the only animals we saw were buffalos in harness pulling ploughs in some cleared sections of land along the way. When we reached our destination we ordered some food at an open air food stall and while it was being cooked we climbed down the bank of the Black Fish River to inspect the Columnar Joint. This is a strange geological structure produced by the underground cooling of magma under pressure, and which subsequent weathering over the eons has conveniently caused to be visible on the surface today. The result is a large collection of closely-packed, regularly-shaped polygonal rock columns jutting out of the mountainside. Each column is trapezoidal, pentagonal, hexagonal or heptagonal in cross-section. The whole structure looks unnatural, no doubt the reason why local people call this feature “God’s Columns”.

Our steamed rice and stir-fried beef and canola stems were piping hot and waiting for us when we returned to the food stall, and along with a bowl of pickled chili and a bottle of Dali beer, made an excellent lunch. We then hired a driver to take us back on safari through the Park to the main entrance from where we caught a minibus back to Tengchong.

Yesterday we were back on a small bus again, this time to Yunfeng Shan (“Cloudy Peak Mountain”) about 50km north of Tengchong. Yunfeng Shan is a Taoist Mountain with several 17th century temples located impossibly at the summit. This peak is itself the result of seismic activity. Upthrusts of molten granite and subsequent weathering of the softer surrounding rock over millions of years have created a narrow, near-sheer peak of solid granite. As we ascended in the comfort of a long, steady cable-car ride over the thick vegetation below, we were blown away by the thought of how, four hundred years ago, people lugged all of the necessary heavy building materials up the side of this peak to build the temples and other buildings still perched at the top today. The cable-car itself doesn’t reach the summit; there is a long, steep staircase carved into the mountainside that needs to be climbed to make it to the very top. But the effort is definitely worth it; the panoramic views from the top are great. Yunfeng Shan is spectacular and a must-see if you’re ever in the area.

It was about 5pm when we descended to the cable-car station at the base, and as there were no drivers in sight we decided to walk the 5 kilometres to the nearest village from which taxis and minibuses leave for Tengchong. Not that we had much choice! But it was a very pleasant walk through cultivated countryside and past attractive rural houses and outbuildings, all watched over by Yunfeng Shan. At one point we passed a house under construction and counted 36 men working on it! The main activity taking place was the hoisting and placement of the large timber roof beams; four or five men were doing the actual work while 10 or 15 others stood below and shouted instructions and suggestions, not all of which seemed to be consistent judging from the responses of the men aloft.

The city of Tengchong itself is relatively modern and green, with neatly manicured parks and gardens. Like many other Chinese towns, it has an air of growing prosperity about it. It has also provided us with a sight we have not seen before on our travels throughout this vast country. In many towns, street-side dental clinics are not uncommon with the work in full view of the public. So if you ever voyeuristically wish to watch someone having a tooth extracted or filled, the opportunity is there. But a street-side hospital with un-obscured rooms? Well, yes, you can see that in Tengchong too. Downstairs from our hotel room in fact, right next to the footwear shop. It seems to be principally a children’s hospital, and as you walk past it’s hard not to notice the people laying in the beds, some of which are pressed up against the clear street-side windows. Even more intriguingly, around the building there are many parents taking their babies out for a walk in the sunshine. One parent carries the baby while the other holds up a short bamboo pole to which is fastened a bottle of fluid that feeds the intravenous line inserted in the side of the baby’s head. Why, I have no idea. It seems strange that nearly all of the babies are receiving this treatment. Presumably it’s evidence-based.

We’ve had a great week in the Tengchong area with mild, sunny weather perfect for walking. The region deserves to be much better-known and on more visitors’ itineraries. With so many interesting sights around, particularly of the geological kind, there’s really only one thing to say. Tengchong Rocks!