The Chinese Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year to westerners) is the biggest public holiday in the Chinese calendar (incidentally, it’s now the Year of the Tiger). Every year Chinese people go back to their parents to celebrate with their families, leaving huge metropolises like Beijing bizarrely ghost town-esque and devoid of life. It’s also an excellent chance for us expats to take a break from city life and go on a tour of China, or at least part of China anyway. This year, Hannah and I decided to go to Yunnan Province in the south west of China; it borders Laos, Vietnam and Burma (or should that be Myanmar? – I can never remember) and has lovely tropical weather, so we’d be feeling an early burst of summer sun, as well as escape from the freezing temperatures of Beijing (honestly, it’s still brass monkeys here, although it’s getting less cold every day).

Yunnan is famous for its mountain scenery (it also borders Tibet and is one of the many places that claims Shangri La for its own), rice terraces and tea plantations. The tour we had booked ourselves on would take us away from the mountains and right up into the rice and tea territories – which are mainly located towards the south of Yunnan, where it’s much warmer than the high places in the north.

We set off early on Monday morning, the 15th February, New Year ’s Day itself. Despite promising myself that I would never book a trip that required a ridiculously early wake up call, I was wrenched from my slumber at the horrific hour of 5am. It was still dark outside, which didn’t make me feel better, and I had to have a strong cup of coffee to eradicate the taste of sleep (I considered pouring some directly into my eyes for the same purpose, but wisely decided against it in the end). My recollections of those early hours are hazy at best and I was mildly surprised to discover that we had successfully made our way to the airport, where we were greeted by our tour guides, who were entirely too chirpy and cheerful for that ungodly time of the morning.

One aeroplane journey later and we disembarked in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan. The first thing we did on arrival was go for lunch, a most excellent way to lift my spirits and properly wake me up. Yunnan food, it should be mentioned, is very spicy and contains a huge amount of mushrooms, being that some 4,000 different species, apparently, of the fungi are found there (not all are edible, though). We were taken to a local restaurant where we were presented with a twist on Beijing and Sichuan hotpot cuisine – mushroom hotpot. The broth that the mushrooms are cooked in was spicy and meaty in taste, making it seem as though we were eating meat - almost. It was actually very tasty and I’ll be looking around Beijing for more of that dish in the future.

A four hour bus ride to Jianshui, where we would be staying for the night, followed lunch, which sounds quite painful but was actually hugely enjoyable. The scenery in Yunnan (as briefly mentioned earlier) is spectacular, and a journey through the countryside is a brilliant way of seeing it in all its glory. We were booked into a courtyard hotel in Jianshui, a style of housing that was lucky to escape destruction during the Cultural Revolution. It’s a brief glimpse into how the wealthy Chinese would have lived before Mao came along. The rooms had, of course, been modernized, but in their attempt to keep things as original as possible, the hotel owners had made one very small oversight: they made sure that the beds in each room were of the same style as you would expect these courtyard places to have. What’s the problem with this? Well, these beds are tiny. Too short and no way near wide enough to comfortably sleep two people, you can’t even dangle your feet off the end of the bed because they’re four poster beds. I’m not a giant by any means, but I can’t imagine how anyone can comfortably in these beds, apart from small children and dwarfs. Fortunately we managed to get some sleep, due mostly to exhaustion from the viciously early morning we’d endured.

Jianshui is a pleasant town, with a lot of Chinese minority people living there, and with a huge fixation on shoes. I noticed it when we left the hotel to go wandering the next morning. All the women seemed to have what appeared to be brand spanking new, incredibly fashionable shoes. Once we got to the main shopping street it became evident why this was: every other shop was a shoe shop. At first glance it seemed as though they stocked all the western brands you could think of, but a closer inspection revealed the truth. The shops were filled completely with Chinese knock-off versions of western brands – and they were flying off the shelves. You could buy any footwear and clothing from the following brands: “Kppaa”, “Nkie”, Cpnverse” and I think you get the picture (yes I’m well aware that these are all sports brands, but proper fashion escapes me and I have to go with what I know). Even now I still can’t quite believe how many more shoe shops there were than anything else.

The local people in Jianshui also have a huge fondness for birds. The Chaoyangmen (literally meaning “Sun Facing Gate”) is located in the centre of town (much like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City are located in the centre of Beijing) and where people congregate with their birds. I don’t know if they’re selling the birds, or merely taking them for a walk and some fresh air (a strange concept, I know, but all the birds are kept caged), but it makes for quite a sight. The afternoon was left to yet another bus ride across gorgeous countryside, this time to Yuanyang, home of the phenomenally beautiful rice terraces.

The itinerary for our trip said that the best time to see the rice terraces is during sunrise and sunset, which meant, of course, that we would have to rise early once again. This time the wake up call was set for 4.30am and a whole troop of foreigners could be seen tousle-haired and bleary eyed shuffling tiredly out of the hotel (for a relaxing holiday it was remarkable how little sleep I had got so far). I had thought that the rice terraces would just be another part of the stunning scenery, especially since they are farmed year round as part of Asia’s biggest crop. Bizarrely, though, the locals have turned the best viewing places into tourist attractions, meaning that in order to get a good place to view from ,you have to wake early and pay to get in, not to mention deal with all sorts of tacky vendors attempting to sell you their wares. When we arrived and slalomed our way through throngs of boiled-egg sellers (everyone needs a hearty breakfast) to a decent viewing location, we were dismayed to see that fog had almost completely obscured the terraces from view. The view was still pretty amazing, though, especially as the rising sun was beginning to taint the darkened sky a light shade of pink, but everyone wanted to see the terraces. At this time of year, they are flooded with water so that when the sun does rise (or indeed set), all the wonderful colours in the sky are reflected in the pools of water below. It’s supposed to be an astonishing sight. We stood there for about two hours, waiting and wishing that the fog (actually clouds, we were that high up) would disappear. Sod’s law of course dictated that the cloud would remain stubbornly covering the view, so we became a little bored and decided to find something else to look at.

Just below where we were stood, and slightly above the rice terraces, was a little farming town that we decided to take a walk around. Most of the buildings were brand new or were still actually under construction, a sign of the amount of money (relatively) that tourism to this spot was bringing in. Some of the locals let us into their homes to have a look around; although these places were new, there were none of the comforts that people from Beijing would expect – no lighting, for example – a different sign showing that, despite the relative wealth being brought in by tourist money, these people still do back breaking work for little pay. Another thing we noticed was how rude some of the villagers seemed to be, and not just to us foreigners, but also to any other tourists. They had obviously not got used to their diminished privacy as a result of tourism, something that they’re really going to have to come to terms with if they want the money to keep rolling in.

In an effort to get us closer to the terraces so we could see what we were missing, we arranged for someone to take us down to the terraces themselves so that we could walk down them. This would have been unbelievably spectacular had the cloud not been so dense and thick. As it was, visibility was no more than two metres in every direction and as the pathways on these terraces were only about half a metre wide, the journey up and down was thrillingly scary. Once we had returned from our jaunt into the cloudy unknown, and we’d got our breath back, our group decided that we should just give up waiting as a bad job and move on to our next destination. This didn’t spell the end of our chance to see the rice terraces in all their glory, for the whole day was to be spent looking for the perfect view. Still in high spirits, we boarded the bus and set off again in search of beauty.

Our next destination, after lunch of course, was Laohuzui (literal translation “Tiger’s Mouth”), a brilliantly named section of the rice terraces. As the day was getting warmer, the sun was slowly burning the clouds away, and we were confident of seeing something mind blowing when we arrived. We were not disappointed. As we crested the final hill, a valley of terraces was magnificently presented to us, the water filled sections reflecting the sunlight like thousands of mirror shards. I can’t really do the sight justice, words certainly can’t and even photographs are unable adequately capture what we saw. We spent the next few hours running around the valley, trying to find the perfect spot to see the sunset. In the end, I suppose it was destiny really, the clouds returned and spoiled the sunset, leaving a lot of people somewhat frustrated at having missed both sunrise and sunset. I didn’t care. Those views are going to remain clearly etched in my mind until the day I die. They were majestic.

The next day would see us returning to Kunming – a long six hour bus ride – in order to catch a flight further south into the real tropical regions of Yunnan to a place called Xishuangbanna. Because our flight wasn’t until early evening, we had plenty of time for the journey (across yet more amazing scenery) so we were allowed a little lie in until 7.30am (it felt like a Saturday lie in until midday in comparison with the last few days). However, we didn’t reckon on the traffic conditions, the insanity of drivers in Yunnan, getting hugely lost and the amount of accidents we’d encounter. On one stretch of road, the only one leading to Kunming (naturally), we counted 12 traffic accidents, all pretty major (including an upturned lorry). These all served to delay us and we could see the tour guides begin to get increasingly hot under the collar and frustrated, ending with one them addressing our bus by saying “never have I hoped that our flight is delayed more than I do now”. Gulp.

We arrived at the airport with 20 minutes until our flight’s scheduled departure time, and since boarding usually ends about 15 minutes before take-off, it didn’t exactly give us much time to check in, get through security and make it to the gate on time. By now, though, our guides had reached a level of frenzied desperation and didn’t care how many people they pissed off in getting us on the flight. Shouting loud apologies to all who could hear (most of the airport, I imagine), they guided us to the front of every queue we faced, seriously annoying a lot of people in the process. One Chinese guy, who spoke a decent amount of English, stepped forward to enquire, in not altogether pleasant tones, just what the hell did we think we were doing pushing in. Our explanation that our flight was shortly to depart was met with a stony gaze and a muttered exclamation “shit!”. In fairness to him it can’t have looked good to see a whole bunch of westerners blatantly queue jumping, especially since we’re always on about how much more civilized our queuing system is than that of the Chinese (who don’t have a system).

After having checked in and got through security in record time, we still had to make our way to the gate. We discovered to our horror that they were holding the plane just for us, so we really had to get a move on. We thought by now that all that could have gone wrong had gone wrong and that no more bad luck could possibly befall us. It turned out, however, that fate, the gods, Murphy, whoever, was still in a funny mood - our departure gate was the furthest one away; 40-odd laowai could then be seen sprinting through the terminal carrying numerous bags (including one guitar), narrowly avoiding colliding with other travelers and generally getting on everyone else’s nerves. I arrived first at the gate to see a queue of people still boarding, which meant that we still had plenty of time left. More of our group began to arrive and phone calls were sent out reassuring the late-late arrivals that there was a little time and that they didn’t need to hurry. Then we noticed that the flight number above the gate was not ours. We asked the attendants, who pointed to a plane outside; for one brief moment we thought it was the one taxi-ing towards the runway, but ours turned out to be still stationary on the tarmac. Apparently our departure gate had been changed at the last minute, so off we were sprinting again, making frantic phone calls to others to get into gear sharpish (and totally contradicting our earlier message telling them that they could take their time). Even then it still wasn’t over; one of our number was called back because he had packed a coffee maker in his suitcase and the airport authorities thought it was a suspect device. Unbelievably, though, we all made it onto the plane, only to be greeted by the furious stares of the other passengers, who had evidently been told that it was us that had caused the flight to be delayed. It was suggested by the tour guides that one of us should get up and address the whole plane (since it would look better and appear more genuine if done by a foreigner), telling the other passengers why we were late and that we were sorry. This fortunately ruled me out, since my Chinese is laughable, but a bold Canadian woman got up and did the necessary, actually earning a small round of applause from some on board. Still, it was a relief to get off the flight an hour or so later in Xishuangbanna.

Xishuangbanna is much further south than Kunming, Jianshui and Yuanyang, so it was a lot warmer (in the low 30s); it actually feels a lot like Thailand, and I suppose that’s not too surprising since the local Dai people there (another Chinese minority) are descended from Thai people. It’s an area known for its tea plantations and we learned that we would be seeing one on our last day, the day after seeing some local markets. Before any of that was to happen, though, most of us needed a good stiff drink, so we found a local bar and completely overtook it for the rest of the evening, laughing about how we had managed to annoy practically the entire airport in Kunming and still get on our flight.

The markets were a riot of colour and smells and full of life. The people here seemed much more friendly than those we’d previously encountered, finding us as curious as we found them. Whenever one of our number bought something from a stall in the market, massive smiles were given and whispered conversations quickly had with their neighbours, hopefully along the lines of “I just sold some stuff to those foreigners, how cool is that?” and not something more sinister (I believe it was genuine, what with the amount of attention we got and the smiles aimed at us). We were also told we had a cruise booked on the Lancang River, which is actually the Chinese name for the Mekong River in Vietnam. The cruise didn’t quite live up to its billing, though. On the way there, we passed some glorious sights and were getting properly excited about the upcoming trip. When we got to the port (if it’s possible to call it that), we discovered that it was essentially an old disused quarry and our cruise turned out to be a return trip across the river. The locals looked particularly bemused by it all; I could see their minds working, asking a silent question to us all: “why on Earth are you going to the other side and back, it’s not like the view is good? Are you all weird?”. Yes. We are.

The tea plantation on the last day was more than we all expected, though. We were told that we were to get a tractor ride through a plantation, to a village in the middle of it all, and then back again, which doesn’t sound that great. The tractors themselves were just battered old two strokes with a trailer on the end, enough for six people apiece. However, the plantation was set in a valley and because the sun was shining we got some pretty amazing views from the top of the hill of the entire tea forest (what else can it be called?). When we happened upon a village, we found that a wedding was taking place and were invited in by the bride herself! Moving on through the village, we discovered a Buddhist temple with a difference: all the monks were young boys. It turns out that at the age of about 7 or 8, they are taken away from their parents to be monks for two to three years. We caught them during a lesson, learning a complex Thai-like language by singing it; it was strangely mesmerizing. All in all, it was a sensationally beautiful day. All it needed to top it off was a picnic with some good food and decent wine. Instead we had to settle for going home.