Mainland China - Rice terraces of YuanYang (Xinji) Part I

 

Spending about 2 months in Hong Kong, I still had not been to "real" China. So I was really looking forward to I travelling to mainland China for Christmas holidays. On Christmas Day we flew from Shenzhen, the neighbouring Chinese city of Hong Kong, to Kunming. The archicture of Shenzhen airport is quite remarkable. Its shape resembles an airplane. The whole construction is quite airy and everything appeared rather new. Shenzhen is said to be the fourth-largest aiport in China (after Bejing, Singapore and Guangzhou).

 

 

 

The city of Kunming is situated in South-West China in Yunnan province. With a population of some 7 million (twice the population of Berlin by the way), it's a third tier city in Chinese terms. But anyway, arriving in Kunming we headed for the East Bus Station to get a long distance bus that would take us to Jianshui. We had already booked a hotel in that town further south of Kunming. Well, when we arrived there, we found out that buses to Jianshui are leaving from Southern Bus station. As I like being prepared, I had the Mandarin characters for the cities and guesthouses we were staying in on my mobile phone. This turned out to be quite helpful during the whole journey as few people would understand English. But luckily a younger woman at the bus station understood some English. She wrote down the name of the Southern Bus station. So we could show the taxi driver where we wanted to go.

Our hotel in Jianshui turned out the be a Chinese 5 star one. To my mind, the size of the room was 5 times the size of my room in HK. ;)





As it was already 11 at night when we arrived. We just walked through the streets and bought some food from a food stall at the street.

Jianshui is famous for its old town. So the next morning we were exploring the small streets, gardens and temples.

 

 

Just by coincidence, we found one of the wet markets of Jianshui. You could get all sort of more or less traditional Chinese food there - from duck to chicken feet over frog to dog!

 

At noon we took the local short distance bus to YuanYang. The journey reminded me of driving in a mini van in Brazil - the road was pretty bumpy but the driver didn't mind that at all. So it was free roller coaster ride for 4 hours. ;)