Up to this point in the trip the elevation had been steadily rising, with Kunming and Dali at nearly 2,000 meters, Lijiang at nearly 2,500, and visits to other sites at even higher elevations.  And Tibet, at over 4,000 meters, was still to come.  So after getting acclimated to higher elevations, it made no sense to suddenly travel to the hot, humid, tropical lowlands of Xishuangbanna - but I did it anyway.

Xishuangbanna lies in the far south of Yunnan province very close to the borders of Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Vietnam; it also has all the heat and humidity of those junglelands.  Rainstorms were a constant threat; these pictures in a Jinghong garden were taken just after a huge storm.

The dramatic change in scenery from the earlier part of this trip points out why Yunnan province is perhaps the best area to visit in China: it has a full range of geography, from dramatic mountain peaks to tropical rainforests, from glaciers to swamps.  Only a few hundred miles from Kunming and Dali, the Xishuangbanna region is a world away.

Jinghong is the capital of the region, and provided a good base of operations for exploring the minority villages in the surrounding area.  The city itself is nothing remarkable - just another Chinese city undergoing a huge amount of construction - but it does have the Tropical Plant Research Institute, where these colorful pictures were taken.

Inside a typical Xishuangbanna Buddhist temple.

A stupa near the temple, painted gold.

Many of the people in this region are Dai.  This picture is of a typical Dai home.  To avoid the damp ground in this rainy region, the Dai build their house on stilts; families live inside on the upper level, while farm animals remain below.

A market on the streets of Jinghong, selling very tender and delicious pork.

Evening on the Mekong River, taken from a bridge on the north side of Jinghong.  The waters of the Mekong flow from here into nearby Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Another in the “Great Signs of China” series.  This was taken at the airport in Jinghong, near its three security gates, or "channels": one for Chinese residents, one for foreign visitors, and one for, uh, peculiar people.