I was curious to see the place -- a forest of rock formations, how cool is that?! I was also determined to avoid the crowds, if possible. A guidebook suggested going there late in the afternoon and staying overnight, so that one could "stroll the blissfully empty forest". Now that sounds like an idea, and that was exactly what I planned to do.

Amazing Race Continued...On the Train

Our "amazing race" continued from Kunming. After exploring the western hills, we hurried back to the downtown railway station. Since we had a little time before the train left, we bought water, dropped off mom's cellphone for repair, then quickly wolfed down some "cross-the-bridge rice-noodles"--THE famous Yunnan fare. When we collected the cellphone, and collected some luggage from the temp storage at the station, we had about 10 minutes to catch our train. It was quite some way from the station entrance to our platform, and we started to walk faster and faster. Our sense of emergency was further increased by two girls apparently catching the same train -- they broke out into a run, and so did we. We practically raced the last 200 meters to our train, and by the time we got on I was completely out of breath. Nice workout, I thought, at this rate I would be a much better runner by the end of the trip .

As we were catching our breath, the train started moving. It was really a very enjoyable train ride. The train was half empty and quite clean, and it went smoothly and evenly, accompanied by its pleasant clicking sounds. Soon we had passed the suburb of featureless buildings and entered the countryside. And what pretty countryside! Green hills and mountains spread out as far as the eyes could see -- hills layered with terraces of rice paddies, dotted with villages of red-bricked houses. There were rivers and canyons, the earth was colored a deep red, which reminded me a little of the island of Kauai, thousands of miles away in the Pacific ocean. On the steeper hills corn was planted, and the most common tree was (to our surprise) a kind of eucalyptus! It was a rather scraggy and malnourished looking eucalyptus though, a far cry from the giants we are used to in California.

Zooming in and out of tunnels from time to time, the train went steadily through this pretty landscape, when all of a sudden the scene changed. There was now a new element -- rocks standing on the hillside like trees. We knew that we must be close to our destination, and the train slowed, and stopped shortly after. We have arrived at the Stone Forest.

It was late in the afternoon, the station was almost deserted. But there were a few enterprising people waiting at the exit, advertising their services. "I'll take you to the park, 1 yuan each person," offered a woman who drove a vehicle that looked like a scooter-turned-buggy. That sounded like a nice deal, so we climbed on and went off bumping slowing along the nice and almost completely empty road among the fields of rocks. The sun was shining and the country air was fresh. It felt like quite a pleasant adventure.

Near the gate our driver stopped in front of a youth hostel and introduced us to her "brother", who invited us to stay at the hostel. We declined and told him that we wanted to stay inside the park. So the man offered us a ride in, but then he stopped in front of a different hotel from the one we intended to go. I was a little annoyed, but after inspecting the hotel room and bargained for the room rate, we decided to stay right there -- the hotel looked almost empty, the rooms were standard and clean, and we were paying quite a bit less than I anticipated, so we were happy.

We were now in the Stone Forest national park and ready for some exploration! My guidebook was right, the place was blissfully empty. We wandered around the "little stone forest" (the portion of the park with smaller scale rocks) as the sun was setting, and the moon rose above the rocks. Near the entrance the park was more manicured, with big lawns and landscaped shrubberies. It was very neat and clean, and the rocks were so peculiar looking that they almost seemed artificial. The setting was unmistakably a Chinese park, but a very well managed one, and strangely quiet, which was very counter-intuitive to me, who remembered Chinese parks as noisy, crowded, and often littered with garbage. After a day in a big city, the serenity of the place was very welcoming. The evening air was infused with a sweet fragrance -- I could not place the source of it -- like the scent of a flower, yet also like the scent of a fruit. It was not intense, and it comes and goes, almost like a dreams that verges on one's consciousness. It had an almost intoxicating effect -- that makes one want more of it. We looked around us, but the only obvious blossoms were that of bougainvilea, which was scentless. We walked around drifting in and out of the frangrance and finally it hit me: it was my flower, my namesake flower, Gui. Its English name is Osmanthus, and it is not a flashy flower at all. Light gold in color, the little flowers bloom in clusters, almost camouflaged on the trees. I must have looked through them several times before I realized what they were. Their fragrance had a unique way of drifting mysteriously, often the most intense away from the flowers themselves. That was why it took me so long to figure it out. But now I had a new found respect for my name -- the little flower with such heavenly fragrance!

Waking up at dawn, we were hoping to see the sunrise. But it was cloudy. Nonetheless we set out for a little exploration into the "big Stone Forest". Here the rock formations were grander, and the place had more of a feel of a "forest". One can really get lost in the labyrinth of stony passages here! A park worker adviced us to stay on the main path. But feeling that we possess a great sense of direction, we thought we could go for a little exploration on the side path.

Our chosen path was named "Mother taking her son for a walk", which gave us even more confidence in our ability to find our way. After all, what kind of mother would choose a difficult path to take her son for a walk?

The walk took us through towering rocks, constantly going up and down, turning this way and that, squeezing through narrow passages... there was no one in sight, and it seemed that we had the whole stone forest for ourselves. We were having fun, marvelling at the cool rocks, smug at our cleverness for staying overnight in the park, not noticing that this motherly walk was turning out much longer than we had expected, and oblivious to the fact that we had no idea where we were, and had no way to find out with the rocks all around us obscuring our view. At one point our path met another and we took it on. Still more rocks, more passages... Finally as our surroundings grew more and more unfamiliar, I wondered if we should turn back. But Matthew was sure that "we are going in a loop that will take us back to the main path." So we trod on. Finally, the rocks cleared somewhat and through the clearing we looked at a very different landscape: we were at the top of a little hill, and in front of us, the stone forest spread on through out the hills, interspersed with little terraces of harvested fields, extending far to the horizon. At this point Matthew was still advocating that we keep trotting down the path. "How could they make an infinite path? It's sure to end." he reasoned. While I agreed with his logic, I had to question how long it would take us to traverse this finite path of unknown length, and where we would end up when it actually did end. I no longer believed that it would take us back to the main path. And while the view was grand, I did not want to get more lost than we already were. Luckily, my argument was strengthened by the sighting of a strange unknown city on the far horizon. At this sight Matthew agreed that we really had no idea where we were heading. So we turned around and retraced our steps and finally were on the main path again. Still we were puzzled about how any mother could have taken her son for such a extended and confusing walk...

Lotus in the Clouds

After our little adventure, we were both ready for breakfast. More park staff had arrived by this time, and we saw old ladies in their bright costumes sweeping the paths. The old ladies all liked Matthew as he attempted to speak to them with his limited command of the Chinese language. Little stores were opening up too, and we met a pretty girl standing in front of one, looking exotic in her traditional Miao clothing.

The tourists arrived en masse after breakfast. The whole park transformed into a quite different place, reminiscent of the Chinese parks of my childhood, complete with the noise and crowds. The park was still quite clean though, thanks to the work of the cleaning ladies and perhaps a better environmental sense on the part of the tourists these days.

Bus loads of tourists flooded the park in droves, each group identified by its distinctive baseball hat, and herded by a guide through the "major scenic points", sometimes with the help of loudspeakers.We had finally seen the hordes of Ashimas my sister talked about, pretty girls in colorful Sani costumes. Stalls renting costumes for photographs also materialized. The park was now a hustling-bustling place.

After moving slowly in the crowd for a few minutes, I was ready to call it for a day. However, a turn on a side path unexpectedly took us away from the main crowd. The Stone forest is a big place, after all. And even in the confines of the most visited part of the forest, there were still paths that most tour guides would not lead their herds. At one junction, a sign that read "Lotus in the Clouds" pointed us upwards, while everyone else turned around. Pretty soon we were left to ourselves again, with only the occasional laughter or call from below to remind us that we were actually still quite close to the crowds.

To our surprise, this little path in the middle of the tourist hot spot turned out to be quite an adventure. As we went on, the path became narrower and narrower, in places just one foot wide bridges. "The bridge of Khazad dûm!" exclaimed Matthew when he spotted the first precarious little bridge. The path had also became a little slippery, as there was water trickling through the rocks somewhere. Soon I was clinging to the rock wall as I negotiated the 1-foot-path right by the cliff. I do not think of myself as prone to vertigo, but at that moment I was feeling pretty shaky. Thus we came to the highlight and summit of the trail, "lotus in the clouds", which was a flower shaped rock balanced on another rocky pillar. Sitting on top of the "lotus", Matthew felt quite king of the rocks, or king of the Stone Forest, in any case.

Getting off the lotus, we noticed a different path that seemed to descend into the "root" of the forest, rather than skirting the "branches" and "tree tops" the way we came. Of course we opted for this more exciting route. Soon we met our first obstacle: the path seemed to have stopped at one point, and then picked up about 10 feet later. The 10 feet in between was just a slightly slanted platform of corrugated rock. As I contemplated the best way to cross this unofficial looking "land bridge", I caught sight of a couple on the other side, a young man and a young woman who had apparently gotten lost. The young manseemed to be having some fun, while his poor girlfriend was clearly terrified at this unexpected turn of the path; she was crouching behind, clinging onto the rock for dear life and screaming to her man that she could not possibly stand up. As I crawled on all fours to cross the "land bridge" onto their side, I prayed that the girl would not lost her nerve completely and grab me when I get past her.

On the other side of the "bridge", the path turned into a kind of stone ladder that snaked down the caverns, which explained why the girl was almost scared to tears. I assured her that the other way was much easier but I was not sure that she believed me as she watched Matthew crawling over the "bridge". Leaving the couple behind, we descended the "ladder", thankful for the strategically placed handholds carved by into the stone -- they were polished super smooth by numerous scared hands before us seeking reassurance. At the bottom the path went into a dark tunnel, where we could not see our own feet, then it went up and we rejoined our original path.

What adventure! It was not yet 11 in the morning, but we had already gone on two major expeditions. Quite satisfied with ourselves, we returned to our hotel and packed our bags. Now we were ready to go back to Kunming, and then on to our next stop, Dali.