This is where everything slowed down. The air felt softer. The days stretched. I stopped trying to optimize.

If you missed the Part 1, you can read previous posts here.

Kunming — 3 nights

We were at the Dounan flower market at 10pm — rows and rows of fresh flowers moving through the supply chain while the rest of the city slept.

Asia's largest. 14 billion stems traded a year. Entire bouquets of every variety for less than $2 each.

Standing in the middle of it, we were genuinely a little awestruck. There's something about seeing the behind-the-scenes of China's supply chain — the sheer scale, the precision, the speed — that stops you in a way no landmark ever quite does. It became one of our favourite unexpected threads running through the whole trip.

Next up: Yiwu — home to the world's largest wholesale market for small merchandise, and the city behind most of the cheap, cheerful things that appear in your house without explanation.

Most of the time in Kunming was unplanned. Wandering turned out to be enough - our favorite was the local produce market which felt more like a museum of plants; cute coffee shops, bookstores, specialty tea shops, parks filled with families just hanging out together.

On a whim, we walked into the Municipal Hospital of Chinese Medicine. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting — something ceremonial, maybe, or at least mildly mystical. The doctor took my pulse, thought for a few seconds, and then delivered a thorough and uncomfortably accurate diagnosis of what appeared to be my entire life's mental and physical problems. For $5. I have paid considerably more for considerably less insight.

Hotels: ~¥300/night · Activities: ~¥300/person Honest take: underrated,and worth more time.

Dali + surrounding towns — 14 nights

This is where we stayed longest, and where I'd go back to first.

Tie-dye one day. Clay workshop the next. Cycling along the lake. Long lunches that stretched into the afternoon. No urgency to do anything. At some point my daughter stopped asking "what's next?" and just settled into the rhythm of the days. That shift felt like the whole point of the trip.

Dali is what people mean when they imagine a perfect Chinese life — mountains behind you, a large beautiful lake in front, Bai minority cultural heritage filling it with arts, poetry, and craft, year-round mild temperatures. It's been affectionately called "Dalifornia."

There's a thriving community of expats, artists, and artisans, and we met more homeschooling and worldschooling families here than anywhere else on the trip.

The surrounding towns — Xizhou, Shaxi, Weishan — are worth dedicating days to. Ancient trade towns where people are still living in buildings hundreds of years old. Not preserved. Just home.

Hotels: ~¥300/night, less for longer stays · Activities: ~¥300/person Honest take: best place for slow travel, especially with kids. Would I change anything? Stay even longer

Guilin & Yangshuo — 4 nights

This is the landscape that shows up in Chinese paintings. It's on the 20-yuan note, though you'll rarely see cash anymore. Karst mountains rising from the river, mist settling between them.

We did the Li River cruise — long, beautiful, worth every minute. Then based ourselves in Yangshuo: cycling along the river, bamboo rafting, spending long stretches just being outside. The hotel room was gorgeous enough that being inside was equally defensible.

You've seen the postcard image. The misty karst mountains, the raft, the cormorant birds perched on a pole. Those photos are taken here, and the birds are real working fishermen — trained to dive and surface with fish they can't swallow thanks to a ring around their neck. For $20 you can stand on the raft and pose with them. It is completely, objectively lame. It is also very cool. We did it.

We also learned to weave a small basket — the kind traditionally used for fishing in the village — and went to dip it in the river ourselves. It actually works. We caught fish! I was more excited about this than I expected.

Beyond that, Yangshuo is genuinely good for outdoor enthusiasts: caving, rock climbing, swimming, rafting. The landscape does most of the work.

Hotels: ~¥350/night · Activities: ~¥350/person. Honest take: more touristy than the rest of Yunnan, but still genuinely beautiful.

- Wen

Fuzhou · Quanzhou · Hangzhou · Yiwu · Hengdian · Suzhou

This was the section I hadn't overplanned. It ended up being one of the most interesting.

(In case you're wondering why so many Chinese cities end in "zhou" — it's not a coincidence. It means the city was historically a major economic and administrative hub. Basically, if your city got a "zhou," you'd made it.)

For more details, click below to run the numbers for your family and cities you’d like to visit, and read more on price comparisons with other travel destinations