It has been a while since we've posted, and we're now in Hanoi, but I am going to try and catch us up over the next 24 hours or so. Last Monday we traveled from Kunming to Mi Le for a retreat, and we just happened to drive by the biggest tourist attraction in Yunnan Province, the UNESCO-anointed natural wonder of the world, the Stone Forest. The Chinese are really into being tourists, and they like natural stuff, so the Stone Forest is a big winner. It was as crowded as Disneyland, which you can tell from the picture below if you look closely at how many people are crowded onto the observation tower/pagoda.
The Chinese make Americans look like slugs when it comes to getting around such sites, this one was laid out in a way that it was about a 2 mile walk (minimum) to get around it, and that involved walking up and down hundreds of stone stairs. And everybody does it, teenagers (much less jaded than their American counterparts), ladies in high heels, really old grandmothers and grandfathers, I mean, everybody. Pretty impressive. The forest was formed by water eroding the limestone at different speeds, the following picture shows a pillar that had an official name (I forget what, something poetic) but it caused a lot of snickers and chuckles and everybody took a picture, because it doesn't really take a poet to figure out what it really looks like.
And more pillars, this was a big place, probably a mile square. The surrounding countryside was covered with smaller pillars, but for some reason they were really concentrated in this one area, much to the delight of thousands of Chinese tourists.
Tomorrow, Lijiang.
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