this is an old thread, but i'll be in the same situation next week.

one of my best friend's will be visiting with her 9 year old daughter next week. they only have about 2.5 days in KM.

for one of the days, i'd like to take them somewhere outside (or around) of the city. is there any place you would recommend that is within an hour or so from KM that would be nice to visit, give her a little bit of glimpse of life outside of the city and some pretty views of the countryside (and not too complicated to get to and not a temple)?

or just bite the bullet and do shilin?

within KM, i'm thinking local markets, green lake or haigeng park, ... any other recs?

they'll be coming from Beijing so they'll have already seen the big tourist must sees there... so i'm trying to look for down to earth, local spots to contrast their Beijing visit...

thanks for any suggestions!

I can tell you that the mask is just a bar (a great one) and there is no cover charge beers are like 15+ so cost depends on how much and what you drink.

moon dog is more relaxed and nicer and slightly cheaper, restarunts vary from very cheap 10 to very expensive 200+ per person.

to take a tour to stone forest (this was done about a year ago) was 75 per person included a bus and a ticket in

Haigeng is very nice now and free. Start from west entrance and just keep walking or cycling (no ebikes or cars). Nice views on a clear day. Big contrast from Beijing.

www.gokunming.com/[...]

There are many busses to Haigeng Park, and at the western end of Haigeng Park is the cable car that runs up to Xi Shan. From the top of the cable car ride you can walk (about 1km) or take the chair lift up to LongMen (Dragon Gate). There is a path cut into the side of the cliff (behind a safe wall) and you get great views across the city and DianChi Lake. You can also walk further up towards the top of XiShan if you want to spend more time walking and get away from the crowds.

Thanks for the Haigeng tip!

Would it involve a lot of uphill hiking? Just wondering if my six year old could hack it...

Do you happen to know which buses head over there?

Not sure of which buses but others will advise.
From Haigeng Park up to Xishan would be a serious hike for a 6 year old. I would imagine 2-3 hours going up, and 2 hours coming down. That is a full day allowing a couple of hours to wander around Xishan and Longmen. That is without the bus ride out of the city, and back.

@tigertiger - you mean even with the cable cars/chair lifts, we'd still have to hike uphill for a stretch, right?

No, I thought you were asking about hiking up Xishan, sorry.

If you take the cable car and chairlift, this takes you up to the dragon gate. The path from there is fairly well maintained, but there is a section of stone steps for about 200m. The looping path around Dragon gate is approx 1Km.
If you want to save a bit of money, you can walk back from Dragon gate to the cable car (skip the chair lift), this is a steady downhill slope along a car free road for about 1km. There were also a lot of vendors selling souvenirs on that stretch of road if you like that sort of thing.

Haigeng Paek is free entry, at least from the east gate. I was there yesterday. There's not to see there apart from the lake and the cliffs of Long Men and a few fairground rides. It's not a park in the normal sense, most of it is closed off, with half built buildings which seem to have been abandoned in the middle. Not a bad place to spend half and hour strolling by the lake though.

Btw, next to Haigeng park is Minzu Cun (ethnic minority village). It is okay, worth a 10min stroll around (the free bit that is, haven't been in the ticketed area cos it seems pretty expensive).

My in-laws came from Gansu planning to spend the whole week here, but they are so unimpressed with Kunming they are gonna take a 20hour train to Chengdu to escape the tedium of 'undeveloped village' Kunming. They say the air is too dry here - that's something coming from them given that they live in semi desert areas of Gansu & Ningxia! I don't know how much their criticisms are genuine or just part of the ongoing effort to persuade us to move to Lanzhou! More towards the latter I suspect.