From the South to Kunming

ON July 1 at 7.00am I was at the border between Lao Cai (Vietnam) and Hekou (China) after travelling all night on a train from Hanoi.

The customs procedures went smoothly and shortly after I was finally in China, the last country of my long journey which started in Australia four months ago.

I had left Southeast Asia via Vietnam to get into East Asia. The greatest difference from Vietnam I noticed as soon as I set foot in China was the writings on signs and shops — everything was in Chinese characters. I soon realised that travelling in this huge country with no knowledge of Chinese may be pretty difficult as very few people here can speak English proficiently.

This was actually good for me as I had studied some Mandarin before and this was going to be the right opportunity to practise it.

Another big difference I noticed straight away and which I welcomed was the much lighter and more silent traffic than in Vietnam.

There was only another Westerner crossing the border with me, an English girl called Nina, and since she was going to Xinjie (Yuanyang) as well, we took the same small bus together heading there. Xinjie is only 170km from Hekou, but it took us almost eight hours to get there as we drove mostly through narrow country roads.

And if the landscape around us had been beautiful since we left Hekou — green mountains, densely cultivated land, small villages and the Red River, along which we travelled for most of the trip — when we finally reached Xinjie I was stunned by the magnificent valleys covered with different crops, mostly rice, growing on thousands of small terraces with the most fantastic shapes. And here and there villages could be spotted where some of the 28 recognised ethnic minorities present in Yunnan live. In this area the biggest ethnic group is the Hani, whose women and girls still wear their amazing colourful dresses on a daily base, whether they work in the fields or sell in the market.

Even though we were both exhausted, the very afternoon we arrived we decided to hire a small taxi to take us to a lookout about 10km from our small guesthouse, where one of the best sunset views of the terraced rice paddies can be enjoyed.

In spite of the partially clouded sky the view from above was indeed astounding. Unfortunately the paddies have no water at this time of the year, otherwise the view would have been even more beautiful, as some pictures we saw showed.

The following day we hired two bicycles to ride along a route where another two famous outlooks are found — the first 6km from our guesthouse, the other 18km. A long bicycle ride in the mountains full of uphill and downhill slopes, but both views were definitely worth it, as it was riding through a Hani village, where the local people were watching us with curiosity.

The following day we took a bus to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan.

We left at 9.00am and by 4.00pm we had reached this big city of more than five million people situated at a height of nearly 2,000m over sea level, which makes its average temperatures very pleasant.

Kunming is a modern city, with wide tree-lined avenues and tall buildings in the centre, but apart from its size, three things called my attention as I was riding on a taxi from the place the bus had dropped us: the roofs of many buildings I could see on both sides of the road were covered with solar panels, most of the streets in the centre had a special separate bicycle and motorbike lane and, last but not least, all the motorbikes were electricity powered! Perhaps this is something other countries could learn from.

I only spent two days in Kunming. On Day One I just strolled around trying to get a feeling of this lively city, its pedestrian areas full of shops and markets, its parks full of people practising martial arts or performing singing and dancing (one of Kunming's most beautiful parks, Cuihu Park, was just around the corner from the youth hostel where I was staying).

The other day, on the other hand, was totally devoted to arranging my return ticket to Italy from Beijing — it would be a story too long to tell here, but basically because of the kind of ticket I needed, problems with internet and with my credit cards and wrong information on my guidebook, what normally may take just a couple of hours took me a whole day! But I finally got it, and I also bought the bus ticket for historical town of Dali, my next destination, nearly 400km west of Kunming, which I reached this evening.

There are still many things I haven't seen in Kunming and its surrounding, but I will do all that when I come back in about a week's time before I leave Yunnan for Beijing.The Brunei Times