As I said before, the festival is not in Shiping 'City', but in Longpeng on the 6th of August.

news.kunming.cn/yn-news/content/2012-07/06/content_3010186.htm

www.hh.cn/news_1/xw01/201207/t20120726_390255.html

I doubt that you can find an accurate programme online, but after a 'receiving guests' period there will be an opening ceremony where I assume they will drag out the Huayao Yi in their splendid costumes, followed by lunch (mushrooms?).

The main mystery is what 跳万人烟盒舞 the 10000 men cigarette dance will be.

Longpeng lies on the old road between Tonghai and Shiping. There is a bus about every hour on this road, Longpeng has a (small) number of hotels, which will either be booked out or heavily inflated for the event.

I have never lived in Gejiu, it is one of the few cities I have never even stayed in. However, a few thoughts.

Depending on the hours you will be working, I would consider actually living in Mengzi, now less than one hour away through the tunnel. Plenty of modern apartments and an overall much cleaner city: the honour of being the administrative center of Honghe was taken away from Gejiu a few years ago as the city had run out of space to expand.

Directly around Gejiu you have more a history of heavy industry with the population overwhelmingly Han Chinese. The immediate vicinity of Gejiu and indeed the city itself is still dominated by grimy mining operations with most likely effects on air and water pollution. Sitting in a very small depression where air gets easily trapped certainly does not help.

However, the situation changes completely once you cross the Red River, which is, by bus, only about an hour away. However, from a biking perspective this much further away: the direct route now goes through a long tunnel and then almost a mile down. Then it is another mile up to the more interesting minority areas. North of Gejiu is a succession of plains with the cities of Shiping, Jianshui and Mengzi, all more pleasant than Gejiu and easy to reach.

Transport: eventually the new expressway connecting Kaiyuan and Mile to Kunming will open, which will cut journey times from Gejiu to Kunming to about four hours. The railway from Mengzi to Yuxi was supposed to open this November, but there were still sections unfinished a few weeks ago. Again, once it opens, transport to Kunming will become more convenient.

Overall, I would say that Gejiu would not be in top 100 places to live in Yunnan.

Unlikely to be bugs, more something you might be having on your shoes or the bus on its tires. I do not know what it was, but I think it might be a livestock disease, maybe foot-and-mouth.

This would also explain the thorough bag searches: not looking for contraband, but meat products. Usually the bags just go through x-ray, but that would not pick up foodstuffs.

Just a few links, the event seems to be held every year from July 20-26:

www.yn.chinanews.com/pub/2012/yunnan_0717/63417.html

en.kunming.cn/index/content/2012-07/17/content_3021442.htm

news.k618.cn/reporter/201207/t20120710_2261619.htm

Yimen is actually a pleasant town with good public parks and a nice nearby temple area built around a spring 龙泉寺, go up to the reservoir dam and follow the walkway around it, about 20min walk from the main square.

I am not a doctor, but I think in the UK they give you either Malarone (atovaquone/proguanil) or Doxycycline nowadays, which are also recommended on the page you mention. Either might be easier to find in China.

I took Lariam for a longer while some twenty years back and then bought some ten years ago over the counter in Bangkok which gave me some of the side-effects associated with Lariam in a really bad way. It stopped when I stopped taking the pills. So even if you have taken Lariam before it does not mean you will not suffer from the effects now. Searching for side effects of Lariam gives you pretty horrific stories, such as edition.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/05/19/lariam/. AFAIK, Roche has stopped marketing Lariam for malaria prevention.