Top 10 Things I Learned in Yunnan

Well lovely peoples, I am now back in Shanghai and kicking back for a few weeks before I leave for Europe.

But at this moment in time I would like to share with you some life lessons learned while I was travelling around Yunnan.

10. Never buy sunglasses that don't sit properly on the top of your head. Invariably you will be wearing a turtleneck which means that you won't be able to hang it on your clothes, and invariably you will put them down somewhere, forget to pick them up again and lose them... grr...

9. I can walk!!! Yes I can!!! And I can walk up and down stairs without falling over!!! I did 15km in one day!!! Up and down mountains! With super precarious little itty bitty steps in sheer cliff faces! Without falling! Go Xin! :p

8. I love dogs! Which is a good thing because everyone in Yunnan has a dog basically. They're everywhere, and super cute. I played with the puppy dog sellers on the street in Kunming (and went home hoping that the parents had been well treated and that someone will give them a good home) and the big golden retrievers in Dali... so cute!!! Actually people in Yunnan are dog crazy, I think there is a higher proportion of people with dogs in Yunnan then there are in Australia!

7. Yaks are awesome - not only are they uber fluffy and cute but I love yak milk butter tea (not as awful as it sounds initially I swear) and seeing them wander... soooo cute... Note this is not just my affinity with cows kicking in... I think...
Oh and a further note on the yaks in Yunnan, there ain't no yaks on the Yak Plateau. Or apparently they are only there in summer. I only saw one on the Yak Plateau, and the poor thing looked like it was stuck on the boardwalk. I didn't want to approach it though since one of its lesser cousins down the slope looked like it wanted to charge me and I didn't know if this particular yak would be likewise hostile.

6. Duck! Here comes a busload of tour group tourists!
I really, really, REALLY hate tour group people. I somehow consider myself a superior tourist because I am not in a tour group... I laugh and jeer when the bus drives off to take them to a crappy factory to buy 'silk' doonas at overinflated prices... muhahahah!!!

5. Firecrackers are irresitable to men... we stopped off in a little town on the way to Lijiang for lunch. Johnny saw a firecracker seller on the side of the street and went crazy - "Xin don't you know how awesome this is?!? These firecrackers explode underwater! We could get them, explode them in the river and eat the fish that die!" - yea whatever! I want to report that he wasted 2.5yuan buying these stupid firecrackers and never set them off because we had no time. They were eventually just dumped in a bin at Kunming airport.

4. The first that simple farm people learn when there is an influx of tourists is how to rip these tourist off. Johnny didn't bargain with the apparently 'simple' people on the Yak Plateau selling him tea (again despite my protestations) and paid 25yuan and 10yuan for bags of tea which back in Lijiang cost us 5yuan and 3yuan per bag respectively. Then Johnny developed his great economic theory of loss minimisation which is that he should buy more tea at the cheaper price because it means that it minimises the amount that he was ripped off by at the first place when you average it all out. But of course he can't even take all this tea that he now has back to Australia because of Australian customs regulations...

3. When travelling with companions there are only two governments that work. A strong democracy or a strong dictatorship. A democracy doesn't work if you have a dictator in the group. If you have people who are adverse to dictatorships when you actually have a dictator people argue. Johnny is a dictator, I hate dictators. We argued. A lot.

2. Don't let the people who rip you off and try to con you convince you that everyone is bad... Some of the best times I had was hanging out with the locals. A highlight was taking the last chairlift down from the Yak Plateau with the local ethnic lift operators in the chair behind us singing an ethnic tune for us to pass the time.

1. Travelling is one of the most exhausting things in the world but worth all the money and energy that you must expend. You see things that are indescribable and to which all the photos and all the stories in the world do no justice. You meet cool people and you learn cool things. Travelling really changes you. A cliche but one that is really tried and true...

I'm really looking forward to the rest of my trip... :p