Breasts of Prayer in Kumning

I first visited Kunming 25 years ago (to the month actually) when spending 3 mths exploring China and Tibet on my first big OE. Traveling in China in those days was no cake walk and was often very frustrating, difficult and time consuming … no one spoke english, everything was in Chinese characters, there were few smiles to be had and officials went out of thier way to be bureaucratic.

This “border” city is now modern, clean (if you don’t count the pollution), full of technology, and packed with cars (which create the pollution!). Yes well 25 years is a rather long time, and to expect it to be much the same as before is being rather arrogant lol.

Not only the place but the people have changed. My most vivid memories of the Chinese people were the non-stop smoking, the spitting, the Mao suits that everyone wore – male and female (in only a choice of brown, green or blue), and the generally unhelpful service staff who’s job, it seemed, was to ignore everything you asked for and create as much red tape as possible. This was a natural result of the “system” that dictated there was no value in being helpful because you were paid the same no matter what in your “job for life”. Oh, there were also thousands of black, ancient push-bikes swarming the city’s streets.

This time around my first experience of the new China was at the airport where the immigration officals were smiling and welcoming. At the counter there was even a push-button “give your opinion on my service”  machine to grade the service we received. 

Upon entering the terminal, the first 3 people we spoke to had good english (how many Mandarin speakers would you find at Auckland International !!) and couldn’t be more helpful. We have found this to be quite common (the speaking of english) and it is a breeze to find our way around.

Here we also decided to board an “illegal” taxi to the hotel we had picked out (signs warn about the safety of these!!) but as it was a middle aged woman and her daughter it seemed safe enough . Ross had quite a little conversation with the wee girl in the back as they shared a colouring in book and named items in English .

Our body clocks have taken a bit of a beating over the last few days and some times its hard to decide what day it is. Having only about 2 hrs sleep before catching the plane to Kunming from Vientiane at 4am and with the odd nap here and there you do get abit disorientated . So we did little the first day and had our first big day out in China yesterday with a trip to the “Wild Animal Park” to enjoy, hopefully, some less polluted air.

We were expecting something along the lines of our Orana Park but it was not really the equivilent. It was certainly an improvement on how animals in zoo’s used to be treated although some of the things we saw would not go down well with our animal welfare people back home! For instance the “feeding” of the bears, lions and tigers with tit-bits hung from fishing rods was a rather unusual sight!! To be fair though, these animals appeared to be very well feed and even if only a small proportion of  the Kunming city population (pop 4.6 million) particiapted in the feeding ….. well you can imagine how well feed they would be ….. will post some pics soon . On the other hand the feeding of the Pelicans with live fish that you could buy from a stall might not be everyones idea of feeding the ducks.

We had expected to spend an hour or two but the place covered a huge area and even with the benefit of a motorized train we ended up spending the whole day there. Not only animals to view but animals doing tricks, food halls, photos of “you and animal” (Ross has a lovely picture of him with a monkey standing on his head!!) and a small stuffed animal museum. At one point however there were more people looking at us than the other animals lol. An interesting day out.

I’ve yet to see anyone spit on the pavement, smoking seems to be about non-existant and the myriad of colours, clothes and designer gear are just the same as any other wordly city. Mobile phones and phone shops abound and there is hardly a push bike to be seem. The big down side here is the air pollution …. and for two asthmatics it is very noticable …. but Beijin is supposed to be worse so maybe this is good??.

Oh and your probably wondering about the title of this post . It has been lifted from a sign outside the white tigers area … I think it is supposed to read “Beasts of Prey”. LOL thats China for you