The Bread Has Rose Petals. The Train Goes Through Mountains. Our Dali & Kunming
Day nine of twenty-two. We're heading south — from Lijiang down through Yunnan to Dali and Kunming. Two very different cities. Both full of things we weren't expecting. We stop first at a Bai minority village where more than half the residents make their living through tie-dye — indigo dye, hand-stitched fabric, patterns that only appear after the thread is pulled out. Not a tourist demonstration. Just a grandmother in a courtyard who doesn't look up when we arrive. We eat something called Dali Pizza. It is round. That is where the similarity ends. (The sweet version has rose petals baked inside. Actual rose petals.) Then we board China's high-speed rail from Dali to Kunming — 328 kilometers in under two hours, through mountains that would stop most countries cold. One tunnel on this line, 13 kilometers long, took more than five years of 24-hour continuous shifts to complete. Zarko puts that in context with one sentence about Seattle. In Kunming, we fail to find shoes in a country of 1.4 billion people (Zarko wears a European size 47 — approximately the dimensions of a small boat). Instead, we accidentally walk into an entire retail store dedicated to protecting yourself from the sun, and discover a 2,000-year-old Chinese idea about status that the West has completely backwards. We drive out to the Stone Forest — limestone columns 270 million years in the making, standing 10 to 40 meters tall, looking exactly like something grew here. We rent a small yellow electric vehicle and drive ourselves through it. This is the only sensible approach. And we visit Kunming's Flower and Bird Market. We'll be honest with you about that one. This is Video 4 in our 22-day private tour through China, organized by ChinaTours.com. If you've wondered whether private touring is worth it — it travels at your pace, with a guide who actually knows the places, and often costs less than you'd think compared to a small-group tour. 🇨🇳 Plan your own China journey with ChinaTours.com: https://www.chinatours.com #DaliChina #KunmingChina #YunnanChina ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📍 CHAPTERS 0:00 – What's Coming: Dali, Kunming & Everything in Between 0:01:35 – The Road South: Highways, Mountains & Ten Tunnels 0:03:29 – Zhoucheng: The Village That Lives by Tie-Dye 0:04:54 – Xizhou: Dali Pizza, Mountains of Tea & the Yan Mansion 0:06:40 – Erhai Lake Cruise & China's Photo Ritual 0:07:58 – Three Pagodas & Chongsheng Temple 0:09:19 – Dali Old Town & the Police Photo 0:10:06 – Boarding the High-Speed Train to Kunming 0:11:33 – Arriving in Kunming 0:12:46 – Zarko's Shoe Quest: 1.4 Billion People, No Size 47 0:13:20 – The Sun Store: China's 2,000-Year Status Secret 0:14:38 – The Stone Forest 0:15:48 – Green Lake Park: The Real Kunming 0:17:47 – The Flower & Bird Market: Our Honest Review 0:18:36 – What's Next: Guiyang & the Miao Villages 0:18:36 – What's Next: Guiyang & the Miao Villages