The Rest of the Yunnan Trip

 So first let me finish up my Yunnan trip because that's way overdue. After leaving HeKou where I had a very eventful and interesting village homestay experience we went to another village called Bamei. Bamei is a village that had been completely cut off from the outside world until literally a few decades ago. When outsiders first discovered the village, people were still wearing clothes from dynasties that were long gone.

The reason the village is so isolated is because the only way to access it is through a river that runs through a very long cave. We got to the entrance at around 10PM and took a very dark ride in several canoes through the cave into the village. When you exit the cave you step out into a huge valley with a small river running through the middle of it and mountains on all sides. The next morning we were really able to appreciate how beautiful the village really was. The center of the village was filled with fields of different crops and flowers. The village was completely surrounded by huge mountains. Most of the people who live there belong to the Zhuang ethnic minority. A few of them explained the history of the village to us. Around 600 or 700 years ago there were wars going on and people were being conscripted to fight on one side or another. A few Zhuang people who didn't want to be involved in the fighting snuck away with their families and found the cave where they hid for a while before discovering the valley and setting up a village. Most of the housing and a lot of the structures in the village are still  very traditional but the village has slowly become a little more touristy. Now there are small stores and housing for guests. 

While we were there we hiked around one of the surrounding mountains.  As with most villages we saw, there were kids running around everywhere. One of the parents explained that the kids go to a boarding school during the week and come back for weekends and during the summer. Somebody asked a young girl if she wanted to come back to Bamei to live after she finished school and she replied with a very confident "of course". I cant blame her. Besides the fact that she would get to stay with her family and people of her common ethnic group, I think it would be hard to give up living in such a gorgeous place. 

After Bamei the last major stop we made before heading back to Kunming was Luoping. Luoping is famous for its honey. The first thing we did when we got to Luoping was visit a flower orchard that they use to make different types of honey. Everyone tried to get some pretty funny pictures of themselves running around the acres and acres of yellow flowers. That night we had our first meal in a real, clean, indoor restaurant in a while. The next day we visited an outdoor museum that displayed how water power was utilized by the Chinese throughout history. 

When we got to Kunming, we checked into a really nice hotel and rested. That night we got to explore Kunming a little more which was a lot of fun. It's a really vibrant city with a lot of international influence and a growing population of international students. That night we had dinner at an Indian restaurant and experience a little bit of the nightlife in Kunming. The next day we had a great American-style breakfast at a really cool cafe and went to check out the famous jade market. I think everyone from my trip really fell in love with Kunming. Four or five people in my program have already made plans to move there next year to work and study Chinese. 

That evening we met up with all of the other trip groups at our hotel. It was great to hear everyone else's trip stories. After making a stop at a huge tea market, we went to the airport and headed back to Beijing.