Yay for a Real Anniversary Treat!

Our wake-up call was due to come at the ripe old hour of 6... but didn't come until after 7. A little bit of a later start to a long day than we had hoped, but such is life.

The guy doing our wake-up call actually opened our door... not sure how he did that, but since nothing was stolen from our room during our stay here we figured it was a-ok.

After a little more last minute packing, we asked the hostel to store our big bags for us while we went off to our adventure:
The first wonder of the world : the stone forest

Stone Forest isn't actually in Kunming, it's in another town called Yunnan which is quite far away. After a little navigating we found our way to the 2nd bus of our journey. We didn't know if we were going the right way on the bus (directions here from anybody are particularly sucky and maps are in chinese...) anyway, we hoped we were heading the right way because this bus ride was over an hour (fingers crossed!)

We were right!

Relieved, we got to the Eastern Bus Station to catch a charter bus to the stone forest.
We literally sat in a hot grody charter for almost an HOUR before the thing moved. It was rediculous. We had heard (from our hostel) that they leave every 15 minutes... but not ours...
The bus was full of people just sitting there waiting and not seeming to care!

Just when Stu was about to say something, the bus driver came on and off we went.
It was boiling and I opened my window. The bus driver came and closed it!
I couldn't believe it!
It was the hottest most miserable hour and a half charter ever!

BUT we soon made it to the forest. There was this Chinese guy with his wife and he was staring at Stuart and then he kept staring and said something to his wife and then she started staring. I yelled right at them "Stop staring at us! thanks!"
They laughed....
hahaha.

The stone forest was totally magical. It's a bunch of these massive limestone rocks that seem to be shooting out of theg ground. They are EVERYWHERE and so awesome. We went up to this look out point where you can see them for miles. You should look it up on the web, it's quite the sight to see.
When we were at the look out we met two Chinese people who spoke English and were very nice. We think that the guy was videoing us talking to his girlfriend, and then they took some pictures with us. It was cute.

After a while we decided to go way off the beaten path (we didn't see anyone else for at least an hour!) and squeeze through narrow pathways between towers of rocks until we reached... the eternal mushroom. Sounds rediculous, right? It was BEAUTIFUL! And so desolate! and so romantical! We took a bunch of pictures and then realized we had to go all the way back to the enterance and travel about 3 hours to get back to the hostel and then catch an 11:00(pm) train out of Kunming! We had to motor!

We rushed as fast as we could through the narrow path (which was quite slow still because we didn't want to slip) back to the busses.
The next bus wasn't due to leave for another fourty five minutes! Oh no!!

We decided to make the most of it and went to a little shop and bought some things to snack on while we waited.

The busses weren't so bad. We got back to our place at about 8:30. Just enough time to shower, have dinner, figure out how to get to our hostel from the Lijiang train station, and say goodbye.

...

Unfortunately the hostel had told us the wrong time that our train was leaving (it was a darn good thing we checked our ticket!!!) At quarter to 9 we realized that we had to catch the train at 10!!!! Double oh no!

We quickly grabbed some McDonalds (the closest thing to the bus stop) and caught the bus to the station... and we made it!

HORRAY!

It was a lot of public transit for one day, but we think it was totally worth it! :)