Hiking with cigarettes and high heels

One of my more quiet university students invited Scott and I to Shilin this weekend. His father picked us up in the morning and we made the 100 km drive there. Shilin is home to the Stone Forest, an immense area of limestone pillars. The rock formations are otherworldly in the way they shoot up towards the sky in random configuration. Wandering through the space gives you the feeling that you’re truly in a “forest” of sorts. We were told that millions of years ago, this region was under the sea and when the water slowly receded, the limestone rose and was later carved into these intricate formations by wind and rain.

This also happened to be our first true experience in Chinese tourism. As Shilin is a key stop along the Yunnan tourist trail, the upper-class Chinese were in full force with their flashy new cameras. And before we even entered the forest we were swarmed by tourists from Hong Kong, who apparently found us foreigners just as interesting as the rocks. After agreeing to pose with one, we were stuck posing for a dozen individual shots. One photographer kept insisting that I put my arm snugly around his friend’s as he repeatedly shouted “wife” in excitement, one of few English words in his vocabulary. Our faces made a lot of scrapbooks that day.

The day consisted wandering amongst the rocks, climbing up, down and through narrow passageways and participating in a number of superstitions. Sometimes we had to touch a certain stone with two hands for good luck in business, squeeze our neck through a narrow gap for healthy teeth or bang on a hallow stone four times for a prosperous love life. I was amazed to see that at every corner sat a wooden ashtray. Chinese approach outdoor activity a bit different than westerners. We were outfitted in hiking shoes and jeans, while most of the other people sported slacks and loafers or skirts and heels – puffing cigarettes along the steep pathways. Besides the joys of people watching, the Stone Forest holds striking natural beauty and I can imagine that sunset here would be even more enchanting.

Tomorrow we are taking a night train to Nanning, a city in the southern Guangxi province. Scott purchased our tickets on Friday morning along with thousands of other travelers, making the journey home to their families for Spring Festival. We are booked for a “hard-sleeper”, which basically means that we have two out of six beds in our compartment. From Nanning, we’ll take an 8-hr bus to Hanoi and begin our month-long Vietnam adventure. I can’t wait…