Day 3 (June 22, 2014): Travel to Yunnan Province

The Quick Facts

* Flew from Hong Kong to the city of Kunming, which is in the southwestern Yunnan province in China
* Met up with our tour guide for the week, Frank Hitman, of Zouba Tours (www.zoubatours.com)
* Made the ~5 hour drive from Kunming to Dali, stopping for lunch in Nanhua (the self-proclaimed mushroom kingdom of China) and in Yunnanyi along the way

The Good:

* With the beginning of rainy season comes the beginning of mushroom season, and our first meal in China was chock full of really delicious wild mushrooms
* The trading town of Yunnanyi – we toured an old horse and trader hotel used by traders on the tea-horse trading route that extended from Tibet in the north down into Southeast Asia 

The Bad:

* Nada – so far so good

After the ~2 hour flight from Hong Kong into Kunming, which is in the southwestern province of Yunnan, we met up with our tour guide, Frank:

 

Frank is from the Netherlands, and moved to China about six years ago without knowing the language.  Since then, he has learned to speak near-perfect mandarin (one of the highlights of the trip is to see the reaction of the local people when Frank starts speaking to them in Mandarin) and started his own tour company.  More on Frank later, but I highly recommend his tours if you ever want to get a non-touristy, active, outdoorsy look at the Yunnan province.

 

Yunnan province is in the southwestern part of China.  The province sits on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, with the Himalayas to the northwest and Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam to the South.  Strategically, the province contained the central routes of the Ancient Tea and Horse Trading Route, which connected China with Southeast Asia for thousands of years.  It’s about the size of California, and has beautiful mountains and fertile valleys, as well as the headwaters for three of Asia’s most important rivers: the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween . There are also many minority cultures represented here-- of the 57 recognized ethnic groups in China, 27 of them live in Yunnan province.

Our major stop along the way from Kunming to Dali was at an old hotel in the town of Yunnanyi used by horses and traders in the old days.  It’s now a museum.  The village itself is small, here is the main road.  It is still inhabited today.

 

 

We eventually got to the hotel/museum.

 

First off this is the courtyard where the horses would be kept; people slept upstairs.

 

A better view of the rooms…

 

 

This is very common at hotels and public buildings in China: a map.  This one, made out of horsehoes, depicts the various roads and trading routes leading into/out of China and its neighboring countries.  The center of the map is Dali, and it extends south to southeast asia, north to Tibet and India, and east to Kunming.

This old hotel also pays homage to the Flying Tigers, the name for an American volunteer air squadron led by Claire Chennault, operating in the country at the request of then-leader Chiang Kai-Shek.  The Flying Tigers, so-called because of the paintings on their planes, helped protect the western Chinese border from the advances of Japan during World War II.  Although, they look more like flying sharks to me.  Just sayin'...

 

 

 

 

Before heading out, we stopped to visit a friend of Frank’s who owns a restaurant.  There was a group of school girls there celebrating their recent graduation.  They were very excited to get pictures with Carrie.  Can you blame them?

 

 

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