LuoPing Spring 2014 (moved from old blog)

 

Mellow Yellow in LuoPing

 

LuoPing is a little place about a 4 hour drive from Kunming, which for a few months a year is swarming with tourists and travellers attracted by the blooming Rape Seed flowers. There are only two or three months a year in which these flowers bloom and suddenly the whole countryside is turned yellow as far as the eye can see.


Six of us packed up and made the journey in style, in our rented van complete with driver, for a mini weekend trip away. 

Day one was filled with views of flowers and plagued with bees. The weather was fantastic so we managed to get some beautiful photos. There seems to be one very famous scenic point which was rammed with people. 

If you google LuoPing it seems to be this one place that comes up first. We were dropped off for a few hours whilst our driver went for a snooze in the van. The area is a huge expanse of fields of flowers with little mound/hilly outcrops all over the place, which gives the area a bit of a weird look. There was also a much larger and higher viewing platform which involved a heck of a climb. 

About twenty minutes later and on our hands and knees we crawled onto the platform and posed for photos from all directions. The whole place smelled like a car full of little tree air fresheners with millions of bees swarming in all directions. we were told that if a bee landed on us we were told to just leave it be and not swat at it or that would piss it off, I could understand that people hitting me upsets me too. 

We spent the entire time we were at the flowers covered in bees and feeling a little nervous. Only David managed to get stung much to his disgust and our amusement and relief. Because of all the bees the area was literally dripping in honey, most of which we sampled, and I left with some fantastic honey for my breakfast toast. 

The view was incredible and unlike anything I have seen in China to date. Our pictures inspired a whole host of people from Kunming to make the journey and now almost everyone has visited the flowers in bloom.

One of my old TA's is from LuoPing town which was about half an hour from this flowers scenic area and she had found us a hotel to stay in for the night. The whole town was about four streets big and yet somehow it still took us ages to find the hotel.

The next morning we got up and the weather had changed from beautiful blue skies to cloudy and sometimes drizzly, so we headed off for the JiuLong waterfall (Nine Dragon waterfall). 

From the car park it was about a twenty minute walk along the river to the main waterfall. Luckily the weather stayed dry and we managed to get some nice pics and a pretty decent view. It had got a little colder so coats were broken out and we carried on in true tourist mode. 

The tallest of the waterfalls had a large pool at the bottom with little bamboo boats floating about for our photographic and seafaring needs. We jumped on the boat and the Chinese couple with us, who were scared of falling in, stayed on the shore and watched us giggling. 


We left the waterfall a little cold and damp and started our journey back to Kunming. 

We only had one more stop on the way, other than dinner of course, and that was at the terraces a little way out of the town. We drove up the side of a mountain and through many little windy and too narrow feeling roads and eventually came across a collection of other people and buses parked at the side of the road. the view was amazing and the pictures don't even do it a little justice. The terraces were all swirly little patterns and cool shapes making silly little face shapes in the yellow. Several hours later we were back in Kunming and still seeing yellow everywhere we looked. 

It only took three years but I finally made it to LuoPing and I am so glad we got out butts into gear and organised the trip. A shattering but good trip was had by all.