Kickin' it in Kunming

Kunming was perfect, everything you could ask for from a city in the summertime. Mongolia had been hot and had burned me pretty bad, Guilin had been humid and sticky. But Kunming, Kunming was perfect. The sun was bright, which helped to build my nice summer tan, but the air was cool, which kept us from sweating like idiots like we had been earlier in the travels. But enough talk about the weather ...

Jon and I arrived at our hostel without any problems and we sat in the dining room munching on scrambled eggs and bacon while we waited for our room to be ready. Unfortunately, we were back to our standard travel routines of sharing a room with as many people as possible to save as much money as possible. Our room was an eight person bedroom, but really there was only one other person staying with us so it worked out nicely. After our post-train ritual of showering and changing Jon and I were ready to set out and start exploring the city.

Our first stop of the day was at the Yunnan Provincial Museum, which wasn't terribly interesting, but did have some cool artifacts to check out, some of which you could even touch. :)


From the museum we headed out to check out a park in the city, which was actually quite disappointing. Our guide book had hyped it up way too much and in actuality it was like almost every other park in China, which would have been fine to check out if we didn't actually live here. Oh well, live and learn.


After our park expedition we just kind of meandered around all afternoon. We had lunch at an outdoor restaurant, ducked into book shops, snacked on western food and just enjoyed the afternoon.

In the evening we continued our walking adventure and headed in the opposite direction in an effort to see as much of the city as possible. We walked for hours (we figured we logged close to 10 miles throughout the day) and just took in the beautiful summer night. Nothing too exciting came our way, but it was nice nonetheless.