Glad to hear that things did work out for once in this thread! Good luck on the wildlife sighting
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part seven: 2024-2025
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
Now that you have a phone with you all the time, have you considered using a speech-to-text or dictation app to 'write' during the dead bits of time you have on trains/waiting in queues etc.?
I've found these apps to be quite good for the most part. You can just talk into your phone, and it's not weird because you might just be on a phone call, and it will get the bulk of the text down. You will have to add punctuation, which these apps aren't good at, and probably correct technical/niche words, but those little changes are okay to do on a phone when writing big blocks of text is too slow and tiresome on a small screen.
Your notes app or similar may already have this feature, indicated with a little microphone button next to the keyboard.
Good to know for all the would-be criminals, you probably stick out of the crowd in China
...and now WePay has stopped working because it needs to be ID verified. After looking in every possible part in the app I finally found the place for verification and I can't do it. Because I'm in China now the only option it gives me for verification is with a Chinese ID card. I guess it's my fault for not verifying my ID with my passport before getting to China, but these apps are so frustrating that they don't give any indication that it needs to be done when setting them up and you can't actually find where to do it anyway! Just now I went back through the app trying to find where the verification part is, and I can't find it again!
I did see a bit earlier somewhere in the FAQ which said that the daily limit for an unverified account is 200 Yuan which is what I have used today on it because I was paying for the hotel I'm in now, so that could be the problem (although the message that came up said the account needed to be verified, not that it had exceeded the daily limit). I'm going to try using it tomorrow and see what happens.
The only (white) foreigners I have seen so far were in the hostel in Kunming. I'm in Dali now, which is on the backpacker route, and I still haven't seen a single one.Good to know for all the would-be criminals, you probably stick out of the crowd in China
Sorry about your WePay trouble. If you still can't find the verification part, try "Me" (bottom right) - "Pay and Services" - "Wallet ID". You'll find "ID Info" on the bottom left.
That's where I had found it and lost it again! Thanks.
I had another go and this time I could select passport, and now I have managed to verify WePay so I'm all set once more.
Kunming
I landed in Kunming at about 1.30am and had about five hours to wait until the metro trains started running into the city. I tried to catch up on some sleep but that wasn’t working. I checked my phone could connect to the internet, which it could. My phone isn’t compatible with eSims and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of getting a Chinese Sim card, so I opted for roaming with my home network. That sounds like it would be expensive but they have roaming packs for NZ$30 for two week periods which works out at about $2 a day, and then I just buy a new pack every two weeks. It costs more than an eSim or a new physical local Sim but it’s still not expensive and it works better for me. I got 1000 Yuan from an ATM to make sure my back-up eftpos card would work here and so I’d have spare cash in case the payment apps on the phone didn’t work, then waited until a currency exchange place opened at 6am so I could change the 100 Yuan notes into smaller notes.
Kunming is a really nice city. I was here before a decade ago but I was extremely sick and never actually saw the city at all. I have no idea what sort of illness I had then, but curiously the symptoms were exactly as I have experienced with Covid19. Maybe it was an earlier form of covid – maybe I’m even Patient Zero, and the virus spent a few years incubating and mutating inside me, and then when I went back to Asia in late 2019 it escaped and started the epidemic.
Anyway, Kunming is as clean as a whistle, no rubbish to speak of, no pollution. All the vehicles are electric so there is barely any traffic noise apart for the honking of horns. On my last China trip Chengdu was just a fog of pollution and I’m going back there on this trip – it will be interesting to see if that city has cleaned itself up as well.
I was staying at the Upland International Youth Hostel which is handily situated a couple of minutes walk from Green Lake Park and not far from the Kunming Zoo. It’s a good place, I would recommend it. Obviously you don’t have to be a youth to stay there.
It was way too early to check in (it was only about 7am when I got there) so I left my bag at reception and walked over to Green Lake which is famous in China for the Black-headed Gulls which winter there. The lake is quite small, sort of circular, with be-templed islands in the middle connected with bridges. There is a fairly big bird list on eBird for the park but there wasn’t much there this morning – perhaps in spring or summer there are more birds present. The lake itself was mostly bereft of any birds except the gulls, although I saw a few moorhens and a heron or two. I got my first Chinese mammal of the trip, with a Red-bellied Squirrel but it’s not a new one for my China list because I saw them last time in the country, and it’s not even new for the year list because I already saw them at Bukit Fraser yesterday. The only non-waterbirds I saw were Black-throated Tits high in the trees surrounding the lake, and a lot of Brown-breasted Bulbuls.
Black-headed Gull
Red-bellied Squirrel
Just a little way along the road from the park is the Kunming University which is mentioned in several places on the internet as a great birding spot in the city. I found the entrance, but it was guarded, with scanners and ID checks, and the guards did not seem amused that I wanted to go in to look for birds. So that was out.
Instead I walked over to the Kunming Zoo (link in the preceding post) where I saw White Wagtails in the hoofstock pens and, more exotically, Azure-winged Magpies stealing food from the Emus’ dishes.
The next day I took an early metro ride north across the city to Hei Long Tan Park and the Kunming Botanic Gardens. The Kunming metro system is very easy to use, with all the signs in both Chinese and English, and likewise for the ticket machines. It would be difficult for anyone to get lost using the metro. To get to the gardens I jumped on a bus outside the Hei Long Tan metro station, showing him my bit of paper with the Chinese name for the Black Dragon Pool (which is inside the park) to make sure it was the right bus. It was about fifteen minutes ride and the bus stops right at the gate. There’s no entry fee. The Black Dragon Pool is just a small pool with koi carp in it, but around it I saw a Plumbeous Water Redstart and a Common Kingfisher. Much more unusual was a cute little Rusty-capped Fulvetta foraging through the leaf litter under some bamboo stands beside the pool.
Plumbeous Water Redstart
Rusty-capped Fulvetta
The park is quite extensive, containing gardens and plantations and forest. I struggled actually finding birds – I could hear birds but seeing them was really difficult even amongst sparse trees, something which was the case everywhere I went in Kunming. A lot of time was spent walking around seeing not much. I did add a few birds, like Japanese Tits, Swinhoe’s White-eyes, Daurian Redstarts, a female White-tailed Robin, and a nice male Red-flanked Bluetail.
Thinking that the Botanic Gardens might be a better spot I walked over there. The gardens are in two parts, the East Garden and West Garden which have minimal entry fees (about $1). I visited the East Garden first and for half an hour saw not a single bird although they were calling all around me. It’s like they were invisible. Finally I found the tree which all the birds were in, although they were all birds I had seen today or yesterday, like Brown-breasted Bulbuls and Swinhoe’s White-eyes, or were unidentifiable warblers. One mystery bird was clearly a bulbul but the closest in the field guide was Mountain Bulbul (which I’d seen the other day at Bukit Fraser). I was thinking there was no way Mountain Bulbuls would be in Kunming but in the evening I checked the eBird list for the gardens and they were indeed Mountain Bulbuls. Then I looked up the altitude of Kunming and found that it is on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and sits at 1900 metres.
The field guide for China is not very good. It is thick and heavy, and the paintings aren’t the best. Last time I was in China I made a comment that to identify a bird using the book you need to already know what the bird is. I’m finding it much easier to just take record shots of as many birds as I can and then check the eBird lists later to confirm what they are.
The West Garden seemed just as dead as the East Garden, despite the hundreds of species recorded there on eBird. It was getting towards the afternoon now and there were a lot of people on the paths, it being Sunday. I spent a couple of hours there but apart for a gorgeous Spectacled Fulvetta most of the birds I was seeing were repeats of earlier birds like Black-throated Tits. As I was heading towards the exit I saw a medium-sized bird fly past on a side-path. I went up to investigate and found a small pool. Some Blue-winged Minlas were foraging in the bushes. While I was watching them a big thrush suddenly popped up on a rock beside the pool, looking like a giant Song Thrush. It was a Chinese Thrush, which was a lifer for me, and it turned out this little pool was a popular bathing spot for the local birds, with both male and female Black-breasted Thrushes, a White-browed Laughing Thrush, and Black-streaked Scimitar-Babblers all coming and going repeatedly.
Spectacled Fulvetta
Chinese Thrush
Male Black-breasted Thrush
White-browed Laughing Thrush (the water droplets are from the Black-breasted Thrush bathing to the left of the shot)
I landed in Kunming at about 1.30am and had about five hours to wait until the metro trains started running into the city. I tried to catch up on some sleep but that wasn’t working. I checked my phone could connect to the internet, which it could. My phone isn’t compatible with eSims and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of getting a Chinese Sim card, so I opted for roaming with my home network. That sounds like it would be expensive but they have roaming packs for NZ$30 for two week periods which works out at about $2 a day, and then I just buy a new pack every two weeks. It costs more than an eSim or a new physical local Sim but it’s still not expensive and it works better for me. I got 1000 Yuan from an ATM to make sure my back-up eftpos card would work here and so I’d have spare cash in case the payment apps on the phone didn’t work, then waited until a currency exchange place opened at 6am so I could change the 100 Yuan notes into smaller notes.
Kunming is a really nice city. I was here before a decade ago but I was extremely sick and never actually saw the city at all. I have no idea what sort of illness I had then, but curiously the symptoms were exactly as I have experienced with Covid19. Maybe it was an earlier form of covid – maybe I’m even Patient Zero, and the virus spent a few years incubating and mutating inside me, and then when I went back to Asia in late 2019 it escaped and started the epidemic.
Anyway, Kunming is as clean as a whistle, no rubbish to speak of, no pollution. All the vehicles are electric so there is barely any traffic noise apart for the honking of horns. On my last China trip Chengdu was just a fog of pollution and I’m going back there on this trip – it will be interesting to see if that city has cleaned itself up as well.
I was staying at the Upland International Youth Hostel which is handily situated a couple of minutes walk from Green Lake Park and not far from the Kunming Zoo. It’s a good place, I would recommend it. Obviously you don’t have to be a youth to stay there.
It was way too early to check in (it was only about 7am when I got there) so I left my bag at reception and walked over to Green Lake which is famous in China for the Black-headed Gulls which winter there. The lake is quite small, sort of circular, with be-templed islands in the middle connected with bridges. There is a fairly big bird list on eBird for the park but there wasn’t much there this morning – perhaps in spring or summer there are more birds present. The lake itself was mostly bereft of any birds except the gulls, although I saw a few moorhens and a heron or two. I got my first Chinese mammal of the trip, with a Red-bellied Squirrel but it’s not a new one for my China list because I saw them last time in the country, and it’s not even new for the year list because I already saw them at Bukit Fraser yesterday. The only non-waterbirds I saw were Black-throated Tits high in the trees surrounding the lake, and a lot of Brown-breasted Bulbuls.
Black-headed Gull
Red-bellied Squirrel
Just a little way along the road from the park is the Kunming University which is mentioned in several places on the internet as a great birding spot in the city. I found the entrance, but it was guarded, with scanners and ID checks, and the guards did not seem amused that I wanted to go in to look for birds. So that was out.
Instead I walked over to the Kunming Zoo (link in the preceding post) where I saw White Wagtails in the hoofstock pens and, more exotically, Azure-winged Magpies stealing food from the Emus’ dishes.
The next day I took an early metro ride north across the city to Hei Long Tan Park and the Kunming Botanic Gardens. The Kunming metro system is very easy to use, with all the signs in both Chinese and English, and likewise for the ticket machines. It would be difficult for anyone to get lost using the metro. To get to the gardens I jumped on a bus outside the Hei Long Tan metro station, showing him my bit of paper with the Chinese name for the Black Dragon Pool (which is inside the park) to make sure it was the right bus. It was about fifteen minutes ride and the bus stops right at the gate. There’s no entry fee. The Black Dragon Pool is just a small pool with koi carp in it, but around it I saw a Plumbeous Water Redstart and a Common Kingfisher. Much more unusual was a cute little Rusty-capped Fulvetta foraging through the leaf litter under some bamboo stands beside the pool.
Plumbeous Water Redstart
Rusty-capped Fulvetta
The park is quite extensive, containing gardens and plantations and forest. I struggled actually finding birds – I could hear birds but seeing them was really difficult even amongst sparse trees, something which was the case everywhere I went in Kunming. A lot of time was spent walking around seeing not much. I did add a few birds, like Japanese Tits, Swinhoe’s White-eyes, Daurian Redstarts, a female White-tailed Robin, and a nice male Red-flanked Bluetail.
Thinking that the Botanic Gardens might be a better spot I walked over there. The gardens are in two parts, the East Garden and West Garden which have minimal entry fees (about $1). I visited the East Garden first and for half an hour saw not a single bird although they were calling all around me. It’s like they were invisible. Finally I found the tree which all the birds were in, although they were all birds I had seen today or yesterday, like Brown-breasted Bulbuls and Swinhoe’s White-eyes, or were unidentifiable warblers. One mystery bird was clearly a bulbul but the closest in the field guide was Mountain Bulbul (which I’d seen the other day at Bukit Fraser). I was thinking there was no way Mountain Bulbuls would be in Kunming but in the evening I checked the eBird list for the gardens and they were indeed Mountain Bulbuls. Then I looked up the altitude of Kunming and found that it is on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and sits at 1900 metres.
The field guide for China is not very good. It is thick and heavy, and the paintings aren’t the best. Last time I was in China I made a comment that to identify a bird using the book you need to already know what the bird is. I’m finding it much easier to just take record shots of as many birds as I can and then check the eBird lists later to confirm what they are.
The West Garden seemed just as dead as the East Garden, despite the hundreds of species recorded there on eBird. It was getting towards the afternoon now and there were a lot of people on the paths, it being Sunday. I spent a couple of hours there but apart for a gorgeous Spectacled Fulvetta most of the birds I was seeing were repeats of earlier birds like Black-throated Tits. As I was heading towards the exit I saw a medium-sized bird fly past on a side-path. I went up to investigate and found a small pool. Some Blue-winged Minlas were foraging in the bushes. While I was watching them a big thrush suddenly popped up on a rock beside the pool, looking like a giant Song Thrush. It was a Chinese Thrush, which was a lifer for me, and it turned out this little pool was a popular bathing spot for the local birds, with both male and female Black-breasted Thrushes, a White-browed Laughing Thrush, and Black-streaked Scimitar-Babblers all coming and going repeatedly.
Spectacled Fulvetta
Chinese Thrush
Male Black-breasted Thrush
White-browed Laughing Thrush (the water droplets are from the Black-breasted Thrush bathing to the left of the shot)
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Funnily enough I was going to make a cheeky remark about you having to ensure you didn't catch the mysterious Kungming illness again!
Glad to see you manage to sort out some of your troubles.
Looking at the eBird bar charts (Bar Charts - eBird) this seems par for the course for the park, assuming I got the right Green Lake in Kunming. The only 'expected' birds you missed were wagtail and tree sparrow, unless you left them out. The bar chart feature is really convenient and can give a good gauge of seasonality and rate of occurrence for species, if you take the time to go through them. You can even click the species on the left to see the historical percent of eBird checklists for that week for said species. There are occasional statistical artifacts, namely prominent rarities showing up one year can give a false sense of commonness at a location, but overall, very useful if anyone is interested.
I did actually see Tree Sparrows there, but when I wrote the post I was looking at my year list rather than the day list so I forgot about them.
The bar chart is also useful in that it is taxonomic. When trying to confirm IDs for my birds I have been using the species list for the location but it is arranged by order of sightings so I have to skim down looking individually for, e.g., babblers or warblers, whereas with the bar chart I can see them all grouped together. It does load very slowly though.
You can also view the bar chart via the Illustrated Checklist, which is much easier to view from the hotspot page and will have photos included.
I like that option - it is taxonomic, and has the month chart easily viewable on the left to gauge how common a species is (or if it is unlikely to be seen / possibly an identification error - especially with the date of last sighting also being provided). It only has photos taken at the specific location but I can always click through to see more / better photos for ID purposes.
Xi Shan, Kunming
I had a whole plan worked out for China, but once I got into Kunming I decided to change it around a bit. The original plan was that I was going to be in Kunming for two days, then go to a town called Chuxiong because it has a mountain called Zi Xi Shan which is a birding site. Then I was going to go from there to Tengchong via Baoshan, and from Tengchong see how far I could get towards the Burmese border. After that I would have been heading north to the Dali area.
If you look at the top sites for Yunnan on eBird (Hotspots - Yunnan, China - eBird), almost all of those big-number sites are ones along the Burmese border but it goes up and down as to whether foreigners can visit those sites. I had tried to put a bunch of them into my plan, but ended up dropping most due to either logistics or money or confusion, and settled on just trying for the town of Ruili.
Once I arrived in China, though, I decided to move things around and go straight from Kunming to Dali and then south to Tengchong from there. The main reason for this was my pack is so darn heavy with all the winter stuff in it that I figured it would be far easier to leave it in Dali and go south (where it will be considerably warmer) with just my small bag, and then return to Dali after the southern excursion. The other reason was that I really wasn’t sure how to get to Zi Xi Shan – I had read there was a bus up there but nothing on the internet is reliable for China, and I felt I might be wasting my time. So I decided to skip it altogether and replace it with an extra day in Kunming where I could visit that city’s mountain named Xi Shan. Starting with Kunming and Dali also allows me to ease a little bit more into China travel.
Kunming’s Xi Shan is simplicity itself to reach. Just take the metro to the Western Hills Station (Xi Shan and Western Hills are the same thing) and you’re basically right there as soon as you exit. To your left is an info centre where you can buy tickets for the buses which run up the mountain to the Dragon Gate (where the cable-car starts), but you can instead just walk to the right and the footpath leads directly to the entrance through lots of little restaurants and shops. It’s about ten minutes walk I guess to the entrance, and then the road goes for 4km up to the Dragon Gate where you need to pay to access the higher areas either by cable-car or more walking. You can walk along the road where the buses roar past without slowing, so woe betide anyone in the way, or there is a boardwalk running in lengths for most of the way. There were a fair number of people walking up or down, but it wasn’t crowded. Today was a Monday, apparently weekends are a different story.
There are more restaurants around the Dragon Gate. It was up here that I paid 32 Yuan (c.NZ$8) for a cup of cold coffee. I was trying to order a rice dish for 27 Yuan, asked about coffee as well and chose the Vietnamese coffee, but then it turned out the waitress thought I had changed my mind on the food and just wanted the coffee – and that was 32 Yuan by itself. Kind of annoying!
On the walk up the road I could, as usual, hear birds everywhere but it was very difficult for me to actually see them. There were some trails off the road here and there but they pretty much went straight downhill, and not only is it darker in there but you’d mostly be looking up into the treetops rather than being able to look across at the trees as you could from the road, so I had a look in a couple but didn’t go far into them.
Fortunately there were lots of mixed feeding flocks along the road. The trouble with them is that the birds are moving so quickly, and often behind foliage or against the sky, that it is tricky to pinpoint them and get identifications. Warblers are a particular menace for me – they all look the same and they move so fast. There was a spot where a flock of warblers were swarming back and forth right by the road and I was trying to get photos, and it turned out that a number of them were Yellow-bellied Tits. I didn’t realise how small they are, even though I had seen them before individually (i.e. without other birds for scale).
Yellow-bellied Tit
One of best birds I saw were the White-collared Yuhinas which I thought at first were a particularly dapper-looking bulbul because they are much bigger than “regular” yuhinas. Unfortunately I only have record shots of them, nothing worth posting.
I’ll just put some photos of other birds here rather than try to write how I saw them, because it was basically “walk along the road, see some birds, try to photograph and identify them”. The birds from Kunming for my year list I’ve put here: Zoochat Big Year 2024
Red-tailed Minla
Mountain Tailorbird
David’s Fulvetta
Black-headed Greenfinch
I had a whole plan worked out for China, but once I got into Kunming I decided to change it around a bit. The original plan was that I was going to be in Kunming for two days, then go to a town called Chuxiong because it has a mountain called Zi Xi Shan which is a birding site. Then I was going to go from there to Tengchong via Baoshan, and from Tengchong see how far I could get towards the Burmese border. After that I would have been heading north to the Dali area.
If you look at the top sites for Yunnan on eBird (Hotspots - Yunnan, China - eBird), almost all of those big-number sites are ones along the Burmese border but it goes up and down as to whether foreigners can visit those sites. I had tried to put a bunch of them into my plan, but ended up dropping most due to either logistics or money or confusion, and settled on just trying for the town of Ruili.
Once I arrived in China, though, I decided to move things around and go straight from Kunming to Dali and then south to Tengchong from there. The main reason for this was my pack is so darn heavy with all the winter stuff in it that I figured it would be far easier to leave it in Dali and go south (where it will be considerably warmer) with just my small bag, and then return to Dali after the southern excursion. The other reason was that I really wasn’t sure how to get to Zi Xi Shan – I had read there was a bus up there but nothing on the internet is reliable for China, and I felt I might be wasting my time. So I decided to skip it altogether and replace it with an extra day in Kunming where I could visit that city’s mountain named Xi Shan. Starting with Kunming and Dali also allows me to ease a little bit more into China travel.
Kunming’s Xi Shan is simplicity itself to reach. Just take the metro to the Western Hills Station (Xi Shan and Western Hills are the same thing) and you’re basically right there as soon as you exit. To your left is an info centre where you can buy tickets for the buses which run up the mountain to the Dragon Gate (where the cable-car starts), but you can instead just walk to the right and the footpath leads directly to the entrance through lots of little restaurants and shops. It’s about ten minutes walk I guess to the entrance, and then the road goes for 4km up to the Dragon Gate where you need to pay to access the higher areas either by cable-car or more walking. You can walk along the road where the buses roar past without slowing, so woe betide anyone in the way, or there is a boardwalk running in lengths for most of the way. There were a fair number of people walking up or down, but it wasn’t crowded. Today was a Monday, apparently weekends are a different story.
There are more restaurants around the Dragon Gate. It was up here that I paid 32 Yuan (c.NZ$8) for a cup of cold coffee. I was trying to order a rice dish for 27 Yuan, asked about coffee as well and chose the Vietnamese coffee, but then it turned out the waitress thought I had changed my mind on the food and just wanted the coffee – and that was 32 Yuan by itself. Kind of annoying!
On the walk up the road I could, as usual, hear birds everywhere but it was very difficult for me to actually see them. There were some trails off the road here and there but they pretty much went straight downhill, and not only is it darker in there but you’d mostly be looking up into the treetops rather than being able to look across at the trees as you could from the road, so I had a look in a couple but didn’t go far into them.
Fortunately there were lots of mixed feeding flocks along the road. The trouble with them is that the birds are moving so quickly, and often behind foliage or against the sky, that it is tricky to pinpoint them and get identifications. Warblers are a particular menace for me – they all look the same and they move so fast. There was a spot where a flock of warblers were swarming back and forth right by the road and I was trying to get photos, and it turned out that a number of them were Yellow-bellied Tits. I didn’t realise how small they are, even though I had seen them before individually (i.e. without other birds for scale).
Yellow-bellied Tit
One of best birds I saw were the White-collared Yuhinas which I thought at first were a particularly dapper-looking bulbul because they are much bigger than “regular” yuhinas. Unfortunately I only have record shots of them, nothing worth posting.
I’ll just put some photos of other birds here rather than try to write how I saw them, because it was basically “walk along the road, see some birds, try to photograph and identify them”. The birds from Kunming for my year list I’ve put here: Zoochat Big Year 2024
Red-tailed Minla
Mountain Tailorbird
David’s Fulvetta
Black-headed Greenfinch
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I've only just come across this thread. How shocking to have your plans thrown into chaos by a thief. Good news seems to be that forward planning and your initiative means you have overcome this, so let's hope the trip progresses more smoothly from now on.
I know you plan your trips meticulously, and I have used many of your past trips in my own planning. Great to see you travelling again and really looking forward to future reports.
I know you plan your trips meticulously, and I have used many of your past trips in my own planning. Great to see you travelling again and really looking forward to future reports.
Is your trek through southern China mostly birdy in nature, or are you on the look out for some mammals too? What kind of habitat(s) are you in?
Yes, there was some hand-wringing on first discovery of the missing card but a combination of fortuitousness made everything work out. Luckily I had installed Skype on my phone and laptop so I could keep calling my bank without incurring enormous toll bills. Luckily I had two accounts on my bank card so could immediately move all my money into the one that wasn't accessible through the card number. Luckily I had a back-up card for ATMs (and luckily it decided to work after a worrying number of failures!) - when I get to Japan that will be more important because fortunately the Chinese AliPay and WePay apps work great so I am only using cash here and there for things like ticket machines and buses.
So far everything since then is going smoothly!