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There's tall buildings here! And the now less-spotted, once-ubiquitous white-tiled eyesore - the kind that was ever so easy to clean, if only anyone wanted to clean it. This is Kunming, the bustling city, and my arrival feels really rather abrupt.

I'm pretty sure I ended up booking the Enjoying Hotel purely for the name. There seemed little else to go by. I could have gone for a room in a hostel or guesthouse, but by this point, I didn't have the energy to trawl through hostelworld.com. Nothing had struck me there previously. So, asiarooms did it best to find me big discounts, but failed to find me one of the flashy new town centre hotels. So I am here, enjoying the Enjoying, near the south station.

The lobby is faded marble and glass, overrun by tour groups, and decked out for the fast-approaching new year. The staff are friendly if perfunctory. The room has seen better days, but will do the job: it could have fewer bumps and stains, but there's heat, there's a shower (a shower! with hot water!), a view, t'internet (well, after I call asking how, and they rush up a man with a cable for me) and a great big bed. Oh, and a plasma TV showing 80 channels I can't understand, and 2 I don't really want to. It's OK. Good for the money, but very glad I didn't pay more.

Once again, I need food. I also need a post office, as I finally managed to track down some postcards. They've been pretty elusive so far on my journey within China, and oddly, when I do find them, they seem to only be for the last place I visited. (Writing this, I've been back over a week, and still no sign of them...) So I head to the station, where there is indeed food and a post office. And oh my life, if there's not an awful lot of people too.

I hadn't appreciated just how much goes on in preparation for the new year. And a big part of this is travel, to make sure you're all together. As a result, there are two gigantic marquees set up, covering, between them, the entire not-insignificant surface area of the station square. Their purpose? To sell train tickets. And more importantly, to house the dispiritingly long queus of people desperate to buy them. The normal ticket office simply cannot cope. Actually, getting across to the station square is half the battle: traffic in Kunming is heavy, but fluid, and shows little regard for niceties such as pedestrian crossings and traffic lights. Another leap of faith I've still not manage to get is the traffic-will-flow-round-you-if-you-just-cross-at-a-predictable-pace one. I'm sure it works, but I'm far comfier just waiting for someone to shadow across the busier roads.

So, some food. There's a chain place which is half burgers and filthy chicken (it's a chicken in a box, it's a chicken in a cardboard box) and half Chinese. I opt for the Chinese side, on the sole basis that it has pictures I can point at. Don't ask me what region this food is from, I've no idea, but I seem to end up ordering YANS (yet another noodle soup), which is tasty enough, and seems to be served with a peanut salad (not recommended for chopstick amateurs like me) and a creme caramel type affair.

Marginally energised, I decide to walk into the heart of town, which means a long stroll along the nineteen-to-the-dozen Beijing Lu, a non-stop stream of cars, buses, motorbikes and people, crossed by concrete bridges, flanked by cheap hotels and now eclipsed shops, the kind that can't yet quite admit to no longer being the top of the pile. It gives an introduction to the city, but it's not a fascinating place.

Until you come to Dong Feng Square. This is where the music starts. I wasn't quite sure what was drawing the crowds at first, but as you approached, you could start to make out the singing - here, unamplified and unassisted, but belting out nonetheless. It continued further along the street, although amplifiers and backing music become more common. Dong Feng square seemed to draw an older crowd and more traditional music, but the best singers here fair drew in the masses. Younger singers up the road couldn't muster these crowds, but their caps filled up with banknotes more quickly. It seems that music follows you everywhere in this city.

This brings you to the shopping district. It's... Well, it's a shopping district, in the over-the-top New China style: giant malls, inaccessible to most, but towering over you with big brands and expensive wares (mostly clothing) gaudily presenting themselves through hundreds of miles of neon tubing. It's glass, it's marble, it's very highly polished. There are plenty old gates and the odd old building to give you the sense of juxtaposition, but otherwise, there's little of the past. I need to buy some things, but get quickly exhausted looking: as mentioned before, I'm not the kind of person whose therapy will ever be 'retail'.

But it gets more interesting. Turn the corner, and you have an impromptu massage centre, where white-coated masseurs ply their trade with steely fingers and comfy chairs. Another, and you've a street full of Uighur grills. Another, and you've found a little pocket of something-older-than-1980, full of teahouses, which is where I stop. I want some tea - I'm a big tea drinker - and I quickly get drawn in by the well-practised host to drink and buy: it's part hospitality, part sales, but all enjoyable.

We sit down at a beast of a table, carved out of a huge tree trunk, each levelled layer serving a purpose. Tea is made, thrown, re-made, filtered, pre-warmed glasses presented, slurped, repeated, changed, repeated... I'm lost in the high of the caffeine, the whirlwind of flavours, from the subtle to the deeply smoky, green and black teas from leaves, wheels, 'gunpowder', flowers... It's wonderful, the whole family joins in, and we talk tea as much as we drink it. I plump for pu'er in the end: one 'wheel' of green, and a tube of loose black. (Writing this, I got through yet another pot of this today - the removal certainly hasn't dulled the flavour or the buzz...) He is a little disappointed I don't take more. Frankly, I've no way to carry it if I wanted to...

I head for Cuihu Park, but it's not really the best time of day to see it. It's a nice place, with a nice, relaxing, early evening atmosphere, but the darkness really only allows you views of reflected neon. It's evening meal time again, and somehow Kunming seems more daunting than my previous destinations for finding somewhere on spec for a bite to eat. In the end, I find a big banqueting-style place, all lazy susans and plastic tablecloths, but with some smaller tables at the side. It's brash, it's noisy, and it serves nothing but across-the-bridge noodles, the Kunming speciality that I've been wanting to sample. The menu has a selection of several options, all the same noodle dish, but in different sizes. Sadly, they haven't thought to scale the pictures, so they all look exactly the same (fans of Lost In Translation may recognise this phenomenon). So I go for the smallest (Y10 and still double what I'd normally eat) and go for it.

It comes as a bowl of broth with an oil layer on top to keep it extra-hot - this much I was expecting. With it is a bowl of noodles, and dozens (well, it seems like it) of plates of raw ingredients, thin or thinly sliced, from raw meat to petals. I obviously look bemused, as half the waiting staff quickly rush over and show me what to do (or rather, do it for me) and so I end up with a very strange bowl of noodles. Nice, though.

The Enjoying hotel starts to feel less enjoyable as, having failed to make the aircon-come-heating system work, I get rather cold during the night. Come the morning, the shower I've been looking forward to is good, but the shower unit's been badly built, meaning that I unwittingly manage to flood the entire bathroom, and narrowly miss carrying it out to the hallway. Oh well. At least I'm warm. Breakfast is an odd affair, one of those buffets that can't quiet decide whether to be east or west. So it's dry noodles with bread roll 'croissants' and oddly spiced toast. The fruit disappeared with the coach parties. The coffee is unspeakable.

I've a morning still to go, and, as I'm disappointed not to have found the old town, I decide to go on a hunt for it. It must be there somewhere. I manage to decipher the buses, and head into town for the princely sum of 1 yuan. And the old town is there... Sort of. The bird and plant market is there, but the main street of the old town is boarded up and hoarded off. The other side of it is there, and taken up by a (very enjoyable, very nice looking) new year market, selling all sorts of food, gifts and decorations for the event, with random, gaudy tiger statues and floral arrangements breaking them up. The other side of this is the Zhengyi Fashion Mall, and on closer inspection of the hoardings, it appears that this organisation has taken over the last, wooden, ramshackle street of the old town, and it's due to 'preservation'. The preservation that's taken place so far seems to consist of knocking down and rebuilding something that looks a little bit like what was there before, so I'm not sure what it will end up like. I don't have high hopes for it.

At the back of this development is another pocket of old town: the signwriters' street, where you can buy all sorts of sign-related or calligraphic products. Ironically the shops' signs are particularly uninspired. More bits and pieces of old building appear, and it seems the main bird and flower market has been rehoused in a combination of a few old-ish shophouses, and a big, concrete market hall. It's uninspiring, but I'm glad to have seen at least a hint of what Kunming used to look like.

So it's off again... Back to the hotel and back to the airport, once again taking next to no time in one of the plentiful, cheap and honest Kunming taxis.