We left Sangri-La on an early morning flight back to Kunming, where we started out our travels in the province of Yunnan. Since we had made reservation at the same hotel as the week before, we quickly settled into our room. Our first priority and main reason for coming back to Kunming was to pay the balance on our package tour to Tibet to Mr. Cheng. We were relieved when he assured us that everything was taken care of (flights to/from Lhasa, our Tibet Travel permit). It was now official, the three of us formed a tour group to Tibet.

The next day, Jenny had her heart set on visiting a tourist attraction called the Stone Forest (rock in formation of trees and other shapes). We left our hotel around 9am for the bus station in order to buy ticket to the town of Shilin – the home of the Stone Forest – some 2 hours out of Kunming. To our great surprise and disappointment, we were not the only ones with the idea of visiting the Stone Forest on this Saturday. The bus tickets to Shilin were a very hot items – and the next available departure wasn’t for a few hours. The many tour buses going to the Stone Forest were not much help either. We eventually decided that we would try out chance at other attractions in/around Kunming.

We finally took the city bus to Grand park where we spent a very enjoyable afternoon – at a fraction of the price our proposed tour to the Stone Forest would have cost us.

In the evening, we started to take our medication to prevent/alleviate altitude sickness in preparation for our flight to Lhasa tomorrow.