Kunming

Tips 👏

• Stay central, it’s a big city with all the shop within the city centre.

🏠 Accommodation

We stayed in a central AirBnB in Kunming. Very designed and functional, a bit more pricy than usual but worth it if you want to chill.

🚲 Getting there

Bullet train from Guilin in 5 hours.

⏱ Duration

We stayed three nights, including commute, but five would have be better.

❌ Miss

• Yunnan Food by lack of time.
• UNESCO Rice Terrace of Yuanyang since it’s 7 hours bus from the city. Allow three extra days for it.
• Kunming city since we wanted to chill. Plenty of beautiful parcs to visit.

Shilling Stone Forest (UNESCO) ⛰

This is the must-do of the area. It takes three hours by bus, or 1h10 by taxi (600RMB the day) from the city center. We were a bit sceptical initially (a forest of stone, lol) but it was actually incredible and very unique. We started our day with our private driver at 9AM (arranged by our host). We drove up to the forest and started the visit around 10:30AM.

While booking the tickets, we opted-in for the electric car transfer for an extra 25RMB. It saved us one hour walk on a sad side road and brought us directly to the nice spot. From there, we made our way between the stones. We stayed in the main area since that’s where there’s most of the viewpoints were, but the whole park is accessible by walk. It’s very time consuming and tiring since it goes up and down. After a bit of walking, we decided to take some side path where we escaped the forest of people and end up in a very quite and peaceful walk.

After some random walk, we pulled up the map and been to three sites, all located in the main area: the deep and narrow gorge, the glimpse in the sky and the main observation deck.

In total, we stayed on the site for around 5 hours by taking it easy. After what, we met back our private driver and headed to the town for a nice birthday dinner.

Restaurants 🍲

• WildFire: Steakhouse located in the Crown Plaza central (second floor). A bit expensive (London’s standard) but very good steak a big variety of food (vegetarian options too).

Read Next ⏭️

Our stop-over in the active city of Hong Kong, check again Guilin, or go back to the main China post.