Trains Guilin to Kunming

After 4 days in Yangshuo, it was time to get a bus back to Guilin and hop on a train to Kunming. I wanted to go to the water falls near Guiyang to break up the 18+ hour train trip to Kunming, but my friend was short on time and didn’t want to miss Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunan. So we decided to take a train all the way to Kunming.

All things considered, it was a pretty nice trip. I slept most of the way, but managed to wake up in time to take pictures of the Stone Forests that I knew I wasn’t going to waste my time or money visiting. We checked into the Camellia Hotel (probably the same people as the one in Hanoi) where these Israeli girls told me to stay because they had the best breakfast buffet. We stayed in the “cheap” rooms in the old part of the hotel and they were pretty much crap, but reasonable when you consider it included the 15Y breakfast each. Unfortunately, the breakfast buffet was on par with the room.

There wasn’t much to see in Kunming and I couldn’t be bothered to take a bus a few hours out of town to see what the “book” says is overpriced mediocre sights. We went to a nice park in the middle of town and spent an afternoon bird and people watching. The highlight of Kunming for me was the Walmart. LOL OK maybe it was the nice dinner we found one night when we ran into a manager at a restaurant that spoke Cantonese. I was able to order some veggie food without any meat at all for my friend and a good plate of fried beef noodles for myself without the prerequisite liter of oil. I can’t believe how much oil they use in the cooking here in China.

A couple days in Kunming was plenty and we decided not to pay the hotel tour agency the 116Y for a bus ticket to Dali and went to the bus station ourselves. I got us tickets for 81Y instead. It’s crazy how much they charge “Lao wais” as a service charge for tickets. It’s like Chinese Ticketmaster. The bus stopped in Xia Guan instead of the Old town Dali, but across the street from the bus station, we caught a minibus to Gu Cheng for another 3Y.

More train travel tips in China