Steel City Trek Asia: The Yunnan province

We had three places to visit in this province before we could make our way to Vietnam. We got to Kunming after a gruesome journey from Yangshuo but we were only planning to be here for the day, as we were returning here to go to Vietnam. We stayed here one day to hand our passports into the Vietnamese embassy. There really wasn't much to see here, we visited the lake park, where there were loads of people dancing and singing in the park because it was the end of the 14-day spring festival. We stayed at Cloudland Youth hostel, which was an awesome hostel to stay at because it had a pool table, table tennis and a good selection of movies so that kept us occupied all night.

We spent the best part of the next day traveling to Lijiang (8hrs) and it was a mission to find Mama Naxi's Guesthouse in the old town. When we did get there, Mama Naxi (yes she's an actual person) cooked us some food, even though it was like 11 pm. The food was nice but very salty and we felt it in the middle of the night with dry mouth and limited water in the room. We all had dry lips because of it!!

We spent the next day walking around Lijiang old town, which didn't take long. The old town is very picturesque but full of tourist shops. We just chilled out on a rock in a park, whilst listening to music and watching three Chinese dudes flaring (bottle tricks behind a bar). Zack, our new sidekick who we met in Hong Kong and then outside my showers in kunming, was feeling uncomfortable listening to hip hop but decided that he wanted to turn gangster, so we had to help him achieve this status.

The next morning, we got a minibus to the start of the Tiger Leaping gorge and we ended up having a big group coming with us. We made our own way up there because with a group they always hold you back. The trek wasn't too hard apart from the 28 bends, which we were told about before, but the trek had some amazing view from the top with a clear blue river running through the gorge. Personally this actually felt like a trek because it was all dirt paths and not steps or paved paths, which the other treks have had. We stayed at halfway hostel, which wasn't actually halfway but was in a great location with huge mountains in view when you're taking a shit. The rest of the group met us at the same hostel and the boys had a poker night. I'm not very good at this game so I sat out and watched but our boy Elliot shared the winnings with an American. In the morning, it took us an hour to get to the bottom to get the minibus back to Mama Naxi's. Three people, including gangster Zak, got food poisoning from the last hostel so the journey was hard work for them. we didn't stay Mama Naxi's that night as we had black Chris (Eddie Guordo) waiting for us in Dali. Mama Naxi gave us all a kiss on the cheek, a necklace filled with perfumed herbs for good luck and dressed up in here Naxi gear to pose for a pic with us-What a legend!

Dali was our last destination before we went back to Kunming but the problem was that our crew got extended with me, Danny, skater boy Elliot (Jeff Burns), Gangster Zak (Screech) and black Chris (Eddie Guordo) and with us boys together, we couldn't be bothered to do anything and we ended up chilling in Dali, playing pool, table tennis, watching movies and laughing at Screech. We stayed there for 3 days and didn't do anything productive, so me and Danny had a bit of a guilty conscience and decided to hire an electric bike out on the last day to go and sight see. it didn't take us long to go down to the huge lake, the pagoda's and some statue but luckily we got it all in before the rain came down. This is where Screech and Eddie Gordo left to carry on traveling around China and me, Dan and Jeff made our way to Kunming to collect our passports and then head towards Vietnam-YEE HA!