It’s Been a While…

It’s been some time since I’ve made a post here. Life has been extremely busy and stressful these past few months. In fact, were I granted a do-over for one year, 2025 would be my choice. Although life has been stressful, I’ve been able to meet my challenges head-on and overcome them, which is something.

Many of my plans for this year have fallen by the wayside, but I have returned to photography as a means of solace. I’ve resumed looking over my China photographs and just now published a small gallery of my photos from Kunming. I want to say that we stayed in Kunming just two nights and if so, it would have been our shortest stay at any of the points of interest on our two week tour. As we travelled west from Shanghai, the cities we visited became smaller and smaller. Our guide told us that Kunming was one of the smaller cities in China, with a population of just over 5 million people. For perspective; Chicago, a major metropolitan city in the US, is just shy of 3 million people. The scale of China is hard to grasp, even when you’re there.

We visited two major sites that I can recall: Dragon Gate and the Stone Forest. To visit the Dragon Gate I recall taking a tour bus way up near the top of a mountain, and then we walked for a good four hours down one side, visiting the many temples and shrines along the way. The Stone Forest was about an hour’s drive south of Kunming proper and definitely worth the travel as it was the high point of that stage of the trip. These stone formation were once at the bottom of a large ocean several million years ago.