Traditional Chinese architecture at Daguan Park on Dian Lake, Kunming.iSweetRiver/Getty Images
When my wife retired last summer, time – suddenly abundant – presented itself as both a gift and a question. We decided to go to Yunnan province, known poetically as “the South of the Clouds.” The journey was meant as a test: of memory, of endurance, and of our belief that we might encounter an ideal place to settle the body and the spirit.
We planned our itinerary carefully, staying a full week in each of four cities. No longer rushed by work or youth, we travelled deliberately, eating early breakfasts, navigating transit on our own, walking until fatigue insisted on rest. In the evenings, we returned to our hotels to watch local news, plan the next day and let the body account for what it had borne.
Kunming
Kunming, China’s “Spring City,” welcomed us with mild air and a leisurely pace. Of the places we visited, Dian Lake left the deepest impression. It was the lake’s composure that moved me most. Facing the Western Mountains across the water, watching clouds drift and birds trace the air, I felt fully unhurried.
At Daguan Park, among lotus leaves and installations, I wandered into a bamboo grove and remembered leaping from pole to pole as a foster child in a village long since altered. I told my wife about a poem I published in English, an ode to bamboo and its Confucian virtues – uprightness, patience, strength. She listened, amused.
“So you still hope to be a bamboo shoot in English literature?” she asked.
I laughed, embarrassed. Some hopes remain underground far longer than one expects.
On our final evening, we stumbled upon a small park near our hotel. Inside stood several silicified tree trunks, dated by geological markers at more than 200 million years old. One bore faint green sprouts, perhaps reclaiming stone. I asked my wife to photograph them from every angle. The contrast between petrification and renewal felt instructional. Before leaving, I picked up a small fragment from the ground, unsure whether it was relic or reminder.
Tengchong
While still in Canada, we imagined Tengchong as a future refuge – vibrant, green and welcoming. In reality, the town presented unassuming hills and an unremarkable cityscape, as if we had arrived just after its prime. Hot springs revealed themselves only after persistent effort.
Yet disappointment sharpened perception. In Heshun Township, past souvenir stalls and teahouses, we encountered China’s first village library. The town produced scholars, revolutionaries and merchants who ventured abroad while maintaining reverence for education – such as the 1911 revolutionary leader Li Yuegai, the foundational Communist Party theorist Ai Siqi and overseas traders who funded the village school. In two ancestral halls, reading carved injunctions, I sensed how tradition shapes character.
On our way back, I was cheated by a vendor who sold me cheaper sprouts as expensive sanqi roots – a deception I only discovered later when consulting a TCM apothecary in Baoshan City. The irony did not escape me; even within a scholarly lineage, human nature remained flawed.
Dali
If Tengchong unsettled our expectations, Dali restored wonder. For generations, Dali has represented “poetry and the distant” – a phrase popularized in the 1990s by musician and talk-show host Gao Xiaosong from a teaching by his mother, architect Zhang Kequn. As a devotee of poetry, I felt its pull immediately.
In Xizhou, narrow streets bustled. Bai women wore indigo-dyed garments; shopkeepers swept thresholds. We bought dresses for our family and sampled local fare – some forgettable, like the baba cake, but others, like rujiang cheese, unexpectedly memorable. More striking than cuisine were residences organized around screen walls designed to reflect auspicious light and ward off malign forces. Architecture here was cosmology rendered in wood and stone.
Dali Ancient Town felt grander but less intimate than Xizhou. The Three Pagodas of the Chongsheng Temple rose like incense sticks. Climbing the temple complex, breath thinning with altitude, we looked down on the city, ordered yet vulnerable. In the museum, we learned that as many as nine kings had renounced power to live as monks.
At Erhai Lake, the mountains formed a semicircle of protection, and the lake mirrored the sky. Back at our lodging, I suggested Dali might be our future home.
“You’ve forgotten the altitude sickness,” my wife said. “Every breath here is only half a breath.”
Xishuangbanna
Descending into Xishuangbanna, our lungs relaxed. Tropical air replaced thinness with weight. The prefecture felt culturally closer to Southeast Asia. Buddhist temples gleamed; fruit stalls piled high with canistels, rambutans, rose apples and horned melons.
At Manting Park, ancient Dai royal pavilions blended directly into the rain forest canopy. Dancers moved with disciplined grace. Later, at the night market beside the Lancang (Mekong) River, neon lights flashed, vendors called out over music and the smell of roasting lemongrass hung thick in the air. Yet it was the open-air morning market near our hotel that delighted us most, featuring wild forest fruits we could scarcely name, their flavours unfamiliar yet refreshing, and plantains tasting richer and watermelon sweeter than anywhere else.
On our final evening, I stepped barefoot onto the grass near Mengle Buddhist Temple, feeling the earth pulse. I hoped that grounding the body might steady the spirit for the voyage home.
“How would you rate this journey?” I asked my wife.
“Seven and a half,” she said. “Maybe eight.”
It seemed fair. Fatigue and small disappointments had accompanied us faithfully.
“Where next time?” she asked.
“Perhaps Pu’er,” I said. “Lower altitude.”
“What if there’s no ideal place?”
I paused. The answer had been forming all along.
“There isn’t,” I said. “Poetry and distant lands are ideals, not destinations. We can never arrive at exactly the right place at the right time. And even if we did, we would never have the perfect vantage point.”
She nodded, already looking ahead, while I lingered a moment longer, learning to let the clouds pass.