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Our excursion today was to a Wolrd Heritage geological feature 1.5 hours drive SE of Kunming called the The Stone Forest. It is a region about 300 km square of fluted limestone pillars which were part of a sea bed 270 million years ago that had since been uplifted and eroded to their current shapes. Some of the region of limestone pillars has been turned into a recreational park with impressive facilities including a substantial fleet of small electric buses for moving large crowds around the recreation area. Today the visitor crowd seemed mostly to be local Chinese tourists, and numbered many thousands.

The region is also the home of an ethnic minority called the Yi People and we were to see many tour guides in Yi traditional clothing.

During the initial part of our visit we followed the large noisy crowd, but eventually our guide found a path that gave us a very close-encouter with the pillars and was largely quiet and without other tourists.

What a day, an enriching cultural experience followed by an up-close and personal natural experience with the pillars.

Lunch was at a Yi restaurant where we were served some of their specialty dishes, in particular a goat cheese that looked like Haloumi, but without the taste.