Urban Crawl 1

I don't know how many cities I've visited in my whole life, but it's been a lot.

I was born in a city, Adelaide, on the south coast of Australia, and the funny thing is that for the first sixteen years of my life, that was the only city I'd ever seen.

So when I finally got to Sydney and Melbourne I was totally blown away by their scale, and by all the things I'd never seen before.

And while there's some things that all cities have in common (lots of people, traffic, high rise, etc), each one is unique, and there's always things you won't see anywhere else.

China has 700 cities, a staggering 145 of which have populations of over 1 million. 23 have over 5 million.

Kunming, with 7 million, is China's 20th biggest city.

I had such a blast wandering around its fascinating streets, like a goggle-eyed teen.

I visited the beautiful main Confucian Temple, it's ancient, simple, and so relaxing to wander around.

It was hot.

Outside gates

Real bamboo

Unreal flowers

Entrance to the main temple

Yuantong Temple

This Buddhist temple, not too far away, was way more spectacular actually, and I visited just at the right time.

Lunchtime.

This building across the road from the main temple is part of the complex, and they were dishing out delicious vegetarian fare for next-to-nothing. As soon as I arrived at the building the old ladies encouraged me to go and eat. Sweeties.

We all sat on the sides of this temple and devoured the delectable offerings.

Entering the main temple across the road.

This is a beautiful type of palm I've seen in a few places in Yunnan. I love it. It's sort of a cross between a fern and a palm.

There's beautiful ponds, gardens, temples, pavilions and shrines everywhere

No photos allowed inside the main temples, as usual lately.

Man about Town

After that beautifully peaceful interlude I kept wandering around the city.

Loads of people have dogs here. Nice ones.

These two buildings must be close to the top of the Kunming Insta Top 100 Must-Post-A-Pic Charts. Just because. I mean, they're skinny and cool, but..... There were hundreds of people flowing through taking the same pics.

Yeah, including me. But only because I happened to walk past and liked them.

Then I had more noodle soup without meat, (so they put chicken in it).

There's a whole part of Wuhua district (woohooo-ah!) packed with amazing laneways, with a million places to eat and another million stalls to shop at.

Imprisoned feathered fiends

Daji hulu, translated as "good-luck-gourds," are popular here in people's gardens or households as decorations, or occasionally used as bottles for various nice things like whiskies and fragrances.

I am an individual. Not a spoke out of place.

The Kunming Shard

Christian church. There was some deep healing going on in there.

There's a few large Traditional Chinese Medicine hospitals around. The ones I saw were all packed.

Despite using a VPN to bypass the Great Firewall of China, it still doesn't keep local advertisers out of my browsers. This one is marketing online gaming.

I went to the Prague Café, where I ordered the realest iced coffee I've had in awhile. It was delicious. I sat outside at a table writing, pretending to be rich, while all the actual rich Chinese around me delicately nibbled tiramisu, and slowly sipped quite masterful coffee creations, intermittently glancing at their latest iPhones, which they nonchalantly pulled from the baggy pockets of their black Gucci jackets.

There's some serious wealth in China, as I'm sure you know, and, whilst most of it's splashing around the east coast of the country, this particular district of Kunming has some pretty generous helpings of it too. You can see it dripping from people's manicured nails.

This sign was in the toilet at the café. Little did they know that I actually had just pooped in the public toilets down the road, and, for the life of me, couldn't flush them down. Well, actually, seeing as you asked, I couldn't get the last one down, it stubbornly clung to the steel bowl like sticky rice does on your thumb, no matter how much you rub it (or throw water at it, in this case).

Once I realised my efforts were futile, I tried to make a quick getaway, but it wasn't to be. As I opened the toilet door and furtively looked out, unable to prevent a wave of toxic digestive death from pouring out of the open doorway, there right in front of me was a young woman, holding the tiny hand of her small daughter. They were next in the queue. The poor unsuspecting innocents. Unsurprisingly I didn't look them in the eye as I rushed off. I just couldn't.

And I'm sure you needed to know all that.

But hey, I guess our arses are just as important as our mouths, in a way, and, compared to my incessant verbal diarrhoea, which I'm sure you can vouch for, (even right now), my butt hardly ever gets a bloody word in.

Quirky bookshop café

I picked up Bewdy. Xiong had done a stellar job. Heading off on her was like cruising back home in a leather seated Merc, after having arrived on an old clunky bus.

It's a shame I'll need to transport her before having a long ride on her first. Things can be jolted and bent on those long freight trips, unfortunately. It's not ideal.

But I did ride her back home.

Kunming was peaking.

And it rained.

But my baby stayed relatively clean.

In the evening I strolled the district, as I like to do.

The apartments are close to a major axpressway and the main railway station. But you can't hear them from the building.

I bought this delicious bread from a Muslim stall. Deep fried, with cinnamon. To die for.

"Be civilised and do civilised things. Civilised people build a civilised city."

And I thought it was gonna be about encouraging people to cycle, as it's so good for your health and the planet.

Flower cakes. They're basically cakes made with edible roses. And they're delicious.

More pipes. Smoking is big here, unfortunately. The government hasn't got that one under control yet, like it has with many other things (eg. spitting, littering, voicing your own opinion etc). Lots of people smoke, and they smoke everywhere, including in hotel rooms (yuk), lifts and eating places.

The tobacco lobby must be big here I guess. Bugger the costs to peope's lives or the public health system.

Another TCM hospital

Necking

A memorial to the many thousands of local people who died in the construction of the Kunming to Haiphong Railway, which was built by the French in the first decade of the 1900s, to provide trading access for European goods to China, and give the French access to Yunnan's huge reserves of natural resources, minerals and opium.

The French were given the right to build the railway on Chinese territory after China's defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s. The Chinese basically had no say in the matter, but Chinese "coolies" (unskilled local labourers) were used during construction. And many died, as the work was outrageously dangerous in the mountainous areas.

Expensive barber. $14 Oz for a cut.

Fear Runs Deep

When I got back home in the evening the strangest thing happened.

As I knew I'd be transporting my bike in the morning, and knew that the freight company wouldn't transport any flammable liquids, I needed to empty  the fuel bottle for my multi-fuel cooking stove, which had unleaded petrol in it.

I could've just ditched it in some wasteland somewhere but I wanted to do the right thing, so asked my host Zhou where I could put it. She wasn't exactly sure, and rang the apartment security guys to find out.

And then it all started.

After the call Zhou was totally spooked, said she'd been interrogated by them, and became absolutely paranoid that the security bureau, which I won't name here, could visit her the next day, which seemed to scare the living crap out of her.

You can't go to a servo in China and get fuel put into a bottle. You need to show your ID at the servo, and only have it put into vehicles. Pretty dumb huh, given that you can't uninvent siphoning.

So after all that, Zhou then told me, that, actually, she wasn't supposed to host foreigners in her apartment, and, as a result, very apologetically asked me to leave the next morning, assuring me that she'd give me a refund for the unused night. She didn't want me to be there if the bureau arrived.

I couldn't believe it. She actually appeared scared.

And then, to turn what I thought was a molehill into an even bigger mountain for her, she told her two young daughters to return the bracelet gifts I'd given them, I assume so that if the security people saw them they'd ask about them, and maybe find out that there was an evil foreigner there.

So there ya go.

I really didn't expect that. Fear and control is alive and well in some places.

I mean, it was no big deal for me, I just found another place to stay straight away. It was just sad, particularly for the kids.

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Go to Part 2