We arrived in Kunming after 46 hours on the train, our longest journey yet and hopefully we will never have to do that again. Although the beds were reasonably comfy, sitting/lying in one place for 2 days is a nightmare. We were both really bored by the last 6 hours and just wanted to get their. The upside to the journey was the great scenery. It is very similar to Vietnam but on a vaster scale.

Once we had eaten we got a taxi to a hostel, expecting to be in dorms for the first time, but luckily for us they had discounted prices on their hotel rooms so we have a decent room including breakfast for 7 pound a night. Overall China is really cheap for food, drink and local transport, its reasonable for accommodation but as the country is so vast the long distance travel is quite expensive.

Our first job when we got to Kunming after we had had a shower was to try and book a flight from Kunming to Hong Kong on the 3rd May as we have realised that there is no way we could get their overland. This was easier than we thought and a lot cheaper as it is May bank holiday and all flights have been reduced to the Chinese travel. We then went for a really nice meal and went for a decent nights sleep.

We didn't really do much while in Kunming as neither of us were feeling 100% after the long train journey so on our first full day we headed to green lake park for a leisurely walk, it was really nice to see some greenery around as the last 3 places we have been to have been cities, and although Kunming is a city it i not half as big. While in the park we stopped off for green tea, obviously there are loads of tea shops around, and its a case of you could spend all afternoon in the tea shop they just keep topping your tea pot up with fresh water, we like all the tea! After the park we went for lunch and had more green tea and then headed back to the hotel to update the web site as the weather had turned really cold and we didn't feel that great either. The web site plan didn't happen as the site was down, bloody typical!

The next day we were both full of cold so decided to take a taxi to bamboo temple as it was recommended that we go and see it, it looked like any other temple really apart from a few differences. Their were 70 surfing buddha's in one temple as well as 70 figures of men all doing different thins, it was a bit creepy really as they looked so life like, unfortunately we couldn't take any photo's which is a shame as this was the best part of the temple as we have seen so many by now. We caught a mini bus back and then it was back on the internet to try and update all our photo's and blogs. We made good progress on this but wanted to get it completely up do date for everyone, so the next day was pretty much spent on the internet before our night train to Dali.

We have eaten a lot of western food while in Kunming, partyly because it has been nice, and cheap but also because we have had a couple of bad experiences with the food. The first on was on the train from Beijing to Kunming. They didn't have an English menu so we did the usual pointing at what other people we eating. We thought we had ordered beef and pork, the beef was ok, but the other meat wasn't anything either of us have eaten before, it wasn't very nice and once Matthew even suggested it could be dog i felt reaslly sick. The other bad meal we had was in our hotel, we both ordered beef, and we did get beef, but it was really fatty and slimey, we are not sure what they had done to it od how they had cooked it, but it wasn't nice therfore we stuck to Salad, Pizza and Pasta for a few days.

Hopefully the chinese food will be nicer in Dali.