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Getting There
The first thing we'd suggest is to plan your trip using domestic airline tickets. We found rather cheap flights on Ctrip. In case you're wondering, it's actually a publicly traded company in the US (ticker: CTRP).
If you noticed from the picture above, we flew out of Shenzhen (instead of Hong Kong), which made all the flights domestic and also saved us some money (as HK -> Lijiang was much more).
For the most part, the airlines were interchangeable so we booked based on time. This actually hurt us in the end as one of our flights home was changed to early in the morning and gave us a long layover in Kunming. We tried switching to an earlier flight, but since our last airline only had one flight, we were stuck unless we paid penalties and fees. We flew the following airlines (and are alive to tell about it):
CZ - 中国南方航空公司 (China Southern Airlines, Co. - part of SkyTeam so miles accrue for Continental and Delta)
FM - 上海航空公司 (Shanghai Airlines - part of Star Alliance so miles accrue for United and US Airways)
MU - 中国东方航空 (China Eastern Airlines - no affiliation that I could find)
CA - 中国国际航空公司 (Air China - part of Star Alliance so miles accrue for United and US Airways)
Phone Card
There are two main mobile phone companies in China: 中國移動 (China Mobile) and 中国联通 (China Unicom). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to purchase the cards online without a large mark-up. It was also a bit difficult to do research as most of the information wasn't really found online. From Hong Kong, both offered a "dual-number" SIM card that would give both a China-based and HK-based phone number on that one SIM. From research on China Mobile, it looks like each region sets its own price and terms so purchases from HK are more centered on Guandong Province (such as free incoming calls within the Guandong area).
While I guess you can use your existing phones and just roam - at least Three HK is such a terrible and greedy service that you're much better off getting a phone card. For example, the roaming rates for Three HK run HK$13.30 (approx US$1.70) per minute for incoming calls and over HK$3 (approx US$0.40) per minute for local outgoing calls.
We purchased a "Easy own HKcard" from China Mobile for 113.5 HKD (approx US$15 or about 10 minutes of roaming incoming calls), which gave us 95 RMB worth of credit. There is a 25 RMB monthly fee so essentially we used this as a one-off phone card for this trip. Service was great - we had reception pretty much everywhere even out in the mountains. For example, in the picture below you'll see in the top-left corner a cell tower - the mountains were littered every few miles with these things.
What to Pack
One of the hardest things for us to figure out was the temperature. Searches on the usual weather sites didn't really pinpoint the appropriate cities. In a nutshell, at least in April, the weather in the cities were cool and pleasant. I think you can get by with jeans, t-shirt, and a light jacket. In the mountains, especially up near Deqin, you'll need to bring heavier stuff, such as a ski jacket or something similar as the mornings can be quite cold (our SUV clocked the temperature at about 39 degrees Fahrenheit in the morning). Some weather links that M found (unfortunately not in English and in Celsius):
Lugu Lake (泸沽湖)
Deqin (云南德钦)
One more thing to pack: a flashlight. It actually proved to be quite invaluable our first morning there as the power went out city-wide. Also, if you go outside the city, there really isn't a whole lot of streetlights nor porch lights.
Finding a *Good* Driver
Lastly, if you're not part of a tour group, to get from place to place within Yunnan, you'll need to find a driver. Now, one of the most annoying things about Lijiang was that we were accosted by people offering to drive us around the surrounding area. (And after you say no to one, somebody else will approach you five steps later. Lather, rinse, repeat. See how this can be annoying?) Usually, they'll just end up taking you to some tourist traps (see Day 2). Luckily, in our preparation for this trip we came across this blog post which recommended a driver from their trip.
We wholeheartedly concur with their experience with Zha Xi Pei Chu (扎西培楚) so if you're looking for a driver, give him a call first. His contact information:
Mobile: 13988733337
E-mail: zhaxi-peichu@hotmail.com
QQ: 970265966
Oh, and yes, we can definitely see his mountain rally driving experience when we were dogged by this army of 20 Toyota SUVs full of Thai tourists that were barreling through these windy mountain rounds at 100+ km/hour.
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