But why can’t I take the subway to the bus station? The map clearly showed a metro line from the station near our hotel to the terminal. Ah, I see. Because it’s not built yet. Right. I suppose that’s a pretty good reason. The number 50 bus it’ll have to be then. Only the number 50 bus never turned up. All the others, but no number 50. In that case, we’ll just take a taxi. What do you mean it’s too far? You’re a taxi driver for Buddha’s sake – it’s your job. Ah, what you mean is “it’s too much hassle”. Right, OK.
Luckily, the lad on reception at our hotel was switched on. So with our phone apps translating, we finally made it to the bus station. An hour and a half behind schedule. But then the challenge of finding the actual ticket office… Eventually we were on the express bus to the Stone Forest. And it took forty minutes less than planned to get there. Or so we thought. Dumped in the car park, we had no idea where to go. Come on, China, help us out here.
Ok, so now we take a golf buggy to the ticket hall. It appeared we were dropped at one end and picked up at the other. But the ticket office wasn’t in between. For some reason only the planner understood, the ticket office was the other end of a plaza on the other side of the road. Twenty minutes later, tickets in hand, we made our way back to the buggy station to catch one into the park. What do you mean we need a separate buggy ticket? Why didn’t they offer that at the ticket office? Better still, as 99.9% of people take the buggy (it’s a fair distance into the park), why don’t you just add the costs together and sell me one ticket?
So we went back to the ticket hall across the road, to a separate ticket counter that looked exactly like the previous one and bought a separate golf buggy ticket.
I’d arrived at the park with expectations. It was only when they were thwarted that I became conscious of them. Natural wonder over a few square kilometres, so that means entrance ticket and then wandering around trails and going off-piste into the semi-wilderness. Wrong.
The natural wonder has paved walkways, signposts and, wait for it… a “ring road”. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, my heart sank as well. I had to revise my expectations and try to enjoy it for the tourist circus that it was.
But it wasn’t that bad. We got the golf buggy a couple of stops round the park and wandered away from the main road:
The Stone Forest of Yunnan was made a UNESCO geopark in 2004 due to its “representative karst features” and “outstanding scientific and aesthetic values”. Formed 270 million years ago over four major geological time periods it is “one of the world’s most spectacular examples of humid tropical to subtropical karst landscapes”. Unsurprisingly, the dolomitic limestone karsts in a “diversity of shapes and colours that change with different weather and light conditions” reminded me of Ha Long Bay:
Karst pits are formed by water dripping on the rock, whilst the “discontinuous fissures” (the cracks that you can see running between the strata) are a result of an “easily soluble component on the limestone with uneven composition”. I’ll leave Dad to explain this one, but I think wheat they meant was that there was a soluble layer in the formation of the strata that has decomposed quicker than those around it, leaving the cracks.
I also learnt that the earth has existed for 4.6 billion years, and liked the table showing the various geological periods (I think I’m a scientist at heart):
I’m definitely a User Experience specialist, though and go through life noting all the potential improvements. For instance, the many maps throughout the site didn’t use the same orientation: sometimes north was up, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. It was like one of those spatial awareness tests.
Once we’d explored we did a complete circuit on the golf buggies. It took ten minutes. This explained why people were already leaving when we arrived – they must have arrived, got on a golf buggy, got off at the central tourist circus and then gone home. Each to their own.
Food was available at the central tourist place, which was welcome – although this looks spongy it’s actually got a consistency not dissimilar to tofu:
Just caught the next bus back to Kunming and off to the train station in the less savoury part of town (“Sam, keep going – you’ve stopped on prostitute corner”):
… to book a ticket out of the city. It was heaving – long queues at each of the ticket counters (not many people using the automated machines, the opposite of most stations in England), with each transaction taking ages (which explains the long queues). And in front of each counter was a turnstile – another reminder of the Chinese culture. I had a flashback to the queue for the sunset temple near Angkor Wat – they had specific staff stopping people queue-jumping and all those I saw who tried to push in were Chinese. You just wouldn’t need the barriers in England. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that you need a passport to book tickets here. Mission aborted. Staying here another day was an easy decision.
