5-Day Yunnan Cultural Journey from Kunming to Shangri-La

Land in Kunming, 1,900 metres up and springlike in every month, which is why the city is planted with camellias and the locals never hurry. After lunch, drive out to Shilin, the Stone Forest: a UNESCO sea of grey limestone blades up to thirty metres tall, raised from an ancient seabed and carved by 270 million years of rain into corridors, arches, and needle gardens. Back in the city by evening for a first Yunnanese dinner - crossing-the-bridge rice noodles, done properly - and a stroll around Green Lake as the lamps come on.

The morning bullet train runs two hours west into the mountains and eight centuries back in time. Dali was capital of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, and the Three Pagodas of Chongsheng - the central one standing since the ninth century - still front the 4,000-metre Cangshan wall. The afternoon belongs to Erhai Lake and the Bai: the morning-market lanes and painted courtyard mansions of Xizhou, indigo tie-dye drying in Zhoucheng, and the lake road as the light goes long. Night in a courtyard inn inside Dali's old town.

Another short rail hop north lands us in Lijiang before lunch. At Black Dragon Pool, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain stands doubled in the water - the classic view of the Chinese southwest - and in Baisha village the Ming-era frescoes and the Naxi's Dongba script, the last living pictographic writing on Earth, tell you whose country this is. The evening is for the old town itself: canal lanes, willow bridges, a Naxi orchestra playing Tang-dynasty music, and dinner in a courtyard where the Tea-Horse caravans once unloaded. Night in a restored Naxi courtyard house.

North by private vehicle up the young Yangtze to the day the week is named for. In Tiger Leaping Gorge, the river narrows to twenty-five metres beneath walls that rise the height of ten Eiffel Towers; we walk the maintained mid-gorge path to the leaping stone, where the full force of the Jinsha detonates past at arm's length. Then the road climbs - pine forest, prayer flags, yaks - onto the Tibetan plateau, arriving in Shangri-La (3,160 m) in time for the giant prayer wheel of Dukezong old town at dusk and a warming Tibetan dinner. Night in a heritage lodge.

At Songzanlin, morning is the hour that matters: horns from the roofline, butter lamps in the halls, and several hundred monks at prayer in Yunnan's largest Tibetan monastery, tiered up its hillside like a small Potala. We climb with the pilgrims, circle the wetland kora below for the postcard view, and take a last look across the plateau before the afternoon flight out of Shangri-La's Diqing airport, or the easy run back to Lijiang's rail line if your route home runs through Kunming.