Travel guide and itinerary prices for traveling from Xinjiang to Yunnan
Tours in Yunnan are usually organized independently, with an escort from Xinjiang for safety and reliability.
Kunming
Kunming is a tourist city with abundant resources, beautiful mountains and rivers, and colorful ethnic customs. It enjoys a worldwide reputation as the "City of Eternal Spring" due to its pleasant climate all year round, blooming flowers, and enchanting scenery. Its superior geographical and climatic conditions also attract red-beaked gulls from Siberia. Every winter, the playful interaction between humans and gulls has become a major attraction of the City of Eternal Spring. Visiting Kunming, one will be fascinated by its lake views, mountain scenery, waves of flowers, and cloud shadows, making it hard to leave.
Stone Forest – Jiuxiang
The Stone Forest enjoys a unique transportation location, serving as the gateway for areas such as northeastern and southeastern Yunnan, as well as Guangxi, Guizhou, Guangdong, and other regions to enter Kunming. It is also an important passage for Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam to enter China. It boasts the Stone Forest, a Paleozoic karst landform community with a long evolutionary history, wide distribution, complete types, and unique morphologies of karst landforms, which is hailed as the "World’s First Marvel".
Jiuxiang Scenic Area, 90 kilometers from Kunming, the provincial capital, is a comprehensive scenic area featuring cave landscapes as the main attraction, combined with natural scenery, cultural landscapes, and ethnic customs outside the caves. It is a unique attraction among Kunming’s tourist destinations. In the crisp autumn air, poetry fills Jiuxiang, with poetry overflowing from your eyes and heart. Jiuxiang boasts hundreds of large and small caves, questioned as the largest and most numerous cave cluster system in China, with a complete range of types and diverse styles. It is known as the "Cave Museum" and has typical karst underground scenery characteristics, with exquisite and magnificent stalactites.
1. Soak up the sun. There is nothing you must do in Dali Ancient City, and there is nothing you can’t do here. The right attitude is not to take anything too seriously. You can skip climbing the ancient city walls, skip buying the expensive tickets to Erhai Lake, and skip rushing through scenic spots, but you cannot deprive yourself of some quiet time. Read books and soak up the sun in a lush courtyard, letting the ultraviolet rays here tan you into a healthy wheat color.
2. Eat local dishes. The ancient city offers authentic Yunnan cuisine and local specialties. Whether it’s the sweet, sour, and spicy Dai flavor, or the locally produced dishes that you can’t even name, as well as the extremely delicious vegetables from Erhai Lake that even the boss lady couldn’t name, they are all so addictive that you’ll want to eat more after tasting them.
3. Drink coffee and beer. What attracts people to the ancient city is not just the food, but also the peaceful and relaxed atmosphere provided by the cafes and restaurants here. Here, people can listen to music, drink cold beer, and spend a leisurely afternoon. Fenghua Xueyue beer is a local specialty that cannot be missed. Moreover, almost all cafes provide travel information and ticket booking services.
4. Buy some specialties. In Dali, if you want to bring home a few unique little gifts for others, you won’t have to worry about not finding a place. In the ancient city or Xiaguan, you can buy stationery sets, flowerpots, vases, lamps, and other marble crafts made of natural marble [5]. Huguo Road is a must-visit for tourists, where you can find a variety of ethnic textiles, crafts, and specialties from various places in Yunnan and Tibet. The many antique shops often bring unexpected finds to visitors.
5. Ride a bike to the surrounding villages. You can find shops all over the streets around the ancient city, offering bicycles for tourists to rent. Riding a bike around the small villages nearby was an amazing experience for me in Dali. Spend one or two days without a map, following uninhabited roads, passing through fields being harvested, and wading through bubbling streams, until you reach a large rural drying field filled with golden corn. The people there won’t try to sell you fake souvenirs, but will sincerely invite you inside for a cup of tea and some milk fan. In travel, nothing is more moving than such sincerity.
Yunnan’s Characteristics
Travel should not just be about taking a casual look and tasting food. While relaxing, one should also understand human geography, allowing travel to broaden one’s horizons and inner cultivation. Otherwise, traveling ten thousand miles would be no different from being a postman.
When coming to Yunnan, besides getting close to nature and enjoying natural landscapes, you should also get closer to Yunnan’s unique culture. The numerous ethnic minority cultures make Yunnan’s culture rich and colorful.
Ethnic minorities are skilled in singing and dancing, and tourists can better understand Yunnan’s unique culture through their dances. Speaking of dances in Yunnan, one cannot help but mention "Dynamic Yunnan", a large-scale original ecological song and dance collection directed by Yang Liping, which showcases ethnic minority dances from Yunnan to the world.
"Dynamic Yunnan" ingeniously incorporates dances of ethnic minorities such as the Bai, Dai, Yi, Tibetan, and Hani into it. Watching "Dynamic Yunnan" is definitely a feast for the eyes and culture. "Dynamic Yunnan" contains five large scenes. Needless to say about the dancers’ flexible and powerful dance moves, and not to mention the beautifully designed costumes of various ethnic minorities, just the hundreds of sacred drums transported back from the mountains will make you feel awestruck, let alone what kind of experience watching the entire performance will be like.
"Dynamic Yunnan", which belongs to Yunnan’s unique characteristics, is a great program to understand Yunnan that cannot be missed when visiting the province.
Clothing Tips
As a famous tourist attraction in Yunnan, Xishuangbanna is located in the subtropical region with a subtropical climate, and the temperature is around 20 degrees Celsius all year round, making it feel like summer all four seasons. You can wear short sleeves here; the climatic conditions in Dali and Lijiang are very similar, and the weather here is very comfortable, even when basking in the sunshine during the day, it feels warm; the winter in Lugu Lake and Shangri-La is a bit cold, with a large temperature difference between morning and evening. If you want to travel in winter, you should bring cotton-padded clothes and down jackets with you.
In spring in Yunnan, the climate is mild, and you don’t have to worry about wind and sand. It’s comfortable and suitable to travel in Kunming at this time, but Xishuangbanna has entered the rainy season, and the temperature is not high; other areas of Yunnan north of Lijiang are colder and not very suitable for tourism; in summer, the climate in Yunnan is generally cool, with Kunming’s summer temperature around 27 degrees Celsius, but it will often rain at this time, and the temperature here will be lower after the rain, requiring us to wear long sleeves. Anywhere in Yunnan is fine to visit, except that Xishuangbanna is hotter at this time and not very suitable.
In autumn, the autumn breeze blows gently, and the temperature difference is large. It’s colder in the morning and evening, so we need to wear outerwear. Other areas north of Lijiang have already started snowing. In winter, the temperature is generally between 12-18 degrees Celsius, and it will rise to around twenty degrees if the sun is out; if a cold front strikes, the temperature will generally drop below 5 degrees, which is quite cold at this time. Kunming does not have heating, and places like Lijiang will be closed off by snow, but Xishuangbanna remains warm and is a good place to visit. What should you wear when going to Yunnan? You should decide based on the environment and season of the place you are going to. Most of the time, one piece of clothing is enough, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility of abnormal weather, so it’s still a good idea to bring a jacket for protection.
Tourists who want to visit Lijiang, Yunnan, should pay attention. The terrain here is high, the air is thin and dry, so the ultraviolet rays here are strong, and the temperature difference between morning and evening is also large. You should bring an extra jacket and a thin cotton-padded jacket to add over your T-shirt when the temperature drops in the morning and evening. Bring sunscreen and wear sunglasses to protect your eyes.
Complete travel guide
Yunnan has a diverse climate, and the suitable travel time varies in different regions. Yunnan has many ethnic groups, beautiful scenery, and is suitable for travel all year round. Kunming and Dali are best visited in spring, while Lijiang and Shangri-La are suitable in spring and summer. The autumn scenery in the Diqing plateau region is also as colorful as Jiuzhai Valley. Winter snow-capped mountains in Yunnan are like a fairyland. So everyone can arrange a trip to Yunnan at a suitable time and encounter a colorful Yunnan belonging to you in your favorite season [13].
Spring travel in Yunnan
The spring has warmed up, flowers have bloomed. Spring has never lacked beautiful scenery, especially in Yunnan, which is like spring all year round. Rapeseed flowers in Luoping in February, cherry blossoms in Yuantong Mountain in March, spring in Shangri-La in April, spring in Yunnan… Spring in Yunnan has already unfolded a beautiful scroll for you. Set out, go spring outing – Yunnan.
Summer travel in Yunnan
Summer is the rainy season in Yunnan, but it is also the peak tourist season. Rainy-season Yunnan actually has the charm and elegance of Jiangnan scenery. It’s hazy, like a half-hidden pipa… Yunnan’s summer is not as scorching as other cities; on the contrary, it’s quite cool. Rain in Yunnan is mostly at night, rarely during the day, so it won’t affect the quality of tourism and will actually make daytime activities more enjoyable. Yunnan’s weather has the characteristic of ‘one rain brings autumn’. The temperature difference between morning and evening is also large, so even in summer, it is recommended that friends traveling to Yunnan bring one or two jackets to prevent colds. In addition, ultraviolet rays on the plateau are always particularly intense, so girls who love beauty, don’t forget to bring sunscreen!
Autumn travel in Yunnan
The arrival of autumn means we enter a cool season, which is also a great season for travel. Where to travel in autumn? Perhaps you’ve already decided, perhaps you’re hesitant. If you want to relax physically and mentally after busy work, why don’t we go to Yunnan! Take a look at this beautiful place.
Winter travel in Yunnan
From November to March of the following year, most parts of the country are covered in ice and snow, with withered plants and a bleak landscape. However, Yunnan, located in the south beyond the clouds, presents a completely different scene at this time – blue skies, sunny weather, green mountains, clear waters, birds singing, and flowers blooming.
Every winter, Kunming, the ‘City of Eternal Spring’, welcomes red-billed gulls from Siberia. They travel from Lake Baikal, across Russia and the whole of China, to Kunming to spend the winter before returning collectively.
Travel consultation hotline from Xinjiang to Yunnan: 0991-8585456 (same number)