I think that bugs from childcare would show as well identifiable sicknesses, and not limited to just you. After few years in place, you would already share most common resistances with your close ones anyway.

How's your wife or others in immediate family feeling?

Store Forest is indeed worth a visit and can be done in a day from Kunming.

Further east in Luoping rapeseed bloomng season is over so you may want to save that for another time. Well, there are still hills. And it may take a sleepover there.

Within city, I don't think that there is anything particularly beautiful.... Dianchi you will get a look on if you do Western Hills. Everything else is pretty much man-made structures that you can see in many Chinese cities.

If mountains interest you, then there is Jiaozi Snow Mountain (not sure if it still has snow cover at this time) close to Kunming, and Tiger Leaping Gorge between Dali and Lijiang, but both may be out of your time schedule.

I believe that best photographic season here might be around end of January, when you have chance to see both Luoping hills and Yuanyang rice terraces in full beauty.

So we got back from Hong Kong today.

And there weren't any problems with my wife and son travelling there and back, using the Entry & Exit Permit type "L" (for tour groups), as individual travellers.

She didn't need to buy any endorsement from Taobao or register with any tour group, we just went with the permits that they had.

I'm not sure if a factor in being able to do that was that she was travelling and doing all check-ins with a toddler and foreign husband, via courtesy channels when available. Could have been different without one or the other.

We had some a couchsurfing couple staying with us few years ago, who had stayed at a farm (in southern Sichuan, if I recall correctly) advertising with ecological and organic farming. The farm was running some program to invite people to stay and "help with the farm work" in echange for lodging, or ecotourism more generally.

But what they saw, was that only a small area within the farm was reserved for this kind of production (as some kind of showroom), while vast majority of the grounds and work on the farm (and probably income as well) came from more "traditional" farming involving dumping the animals full of growth hormones and little caring for their wellbeing.

So indeed, how can you trust what anyone advertises... especially in China, where investigative journalism is very restricted, and critical thinking probably quite uneducated.

We usually buy meat from Q-Life (or some such) supermarket in downstairs of TongDe Plaza mall close to Beijing Lu/BaiYun Lu intersection. They also advertise with these urban values, but who knows...

It's sufficient for us, and some of the staff has befriended us since I used to buy chicken soup to my wife from there when she had freshly (and organically!) delivered our baby, who they have then observed growing up.

I don't necessarily think that it is a blow to competitiveness overall, just blow to foreign high-end professionals there.

Remember that these new deductions are now available also to Chinese nationals.