GoKunming Forums

Bamei Village Wenshan county

HFCAMPO (3062 posts) • 0

My wife is Chinese and she buys all the tickets. The ticket prices are clearly marked on the tickets and the prices I quoted above are for chinese as well as foreigners.

The only place I have visited where the ticket prices differ from the price marked on the tickets is SHA LIN - Sand Forest in LuLiang, Qujing. The ticket price on the window and the tickets reads 100 RMB but the actual price we paid was only 50 RMB.

ricsnapricsnap (193 posts) • 0

For this Dragon Boat festival I went to Puzhehei, Bamei and Babao. Stunning nature that makes you feel Yunnan is the paradise on earth. Considerably different from Yuanyang and Luoping. In fact the karstic landscape is almost as good as in the area East of Hanoi in Vietnam.

Notwithstanding the festival, I didn't find Puzhehei to be that Disneyland other forum users described it in the past. I was clever enough to choose the southern part to sleep at, which comprises the smaller of the two main lakes. There the buildings are more blended in the surrounding nature. I also didn't hire a boat and more responsibly just laughed at the far away 'water wars' between boats. Hiring a bicycle was on the other hand a good choice for touring around the water and getting to see better the ongoing farming activities.

Bamei instead was a big let down. The journeys to get in and out of the small village were nice indeed, along the caves and paths (even if I never like the use of horses here as elsewhere). Yet the village is becoming a tourist trap as I have rarely seen.
Hard to say, but probably 20 or more restaurants/hotels are being built all at the same time, right now, and they are really ugly. Now... they do not resemble the boring Chinese city hotels, since these are smaller in size, but the outlook of them is really ugly. Beams of concrete with ugly looking bricks in between. That seems to be a bad architectural feature of all this area close to Guangxi province.
All in all, thinking about this village moving so drastically from agriculture to tourism, I didn't spend one Mao in buying even a peanut nut there.

Of the three, also Babao was a nice discovery indeed. The tourists are still negligible and there may be more to see than the waterfall north of town and two lovely southern villages (sort of close to the motorway) lost in rice paddies and a winding river.

Side notes: the only compulsory ticket to be bought is the Bamei one, for about 85Y (15Y cheaper when bought on Qunar, but remember that this discounted one has got to be collected it in Wenshan main bus station); there is now a new late bus from Puzhehei to Wenshan at 4:30 pm. Nobody I asked to in Puzhehei was aware of it. The transportation and road conditions are ugly there. But the slower the road, the nicer the landscape.

Related forum threads

Login to post