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Welcome to China
Entry 191 of 323 | show all | print this entry |
At about 3 pm, we got to the Chinese border. Getting through the border crossing was rather simple but customs was a surprise. The fellow x-rayed our bags, and then asked to see our books! We showed him our novels and stuff and he thumbed through them and politely gave us the thumbs up to proceed. I asked what he was looking for and apparently they want to see if any books containing info that is not consistent with party views on the break away island state due east of here (do not want to write name until we leave).
Good thing I did not show my copy of the guide book which contains tons of info about the country, I am sure some which is not in line with Party views.
From there we needed to find an ATM.
We walked around Hekou, and it looked like a rather well off city. There were many nice looking stores with nice things for sale, clothes, electronics etc.
The first ATM did not work, and we started to panic a bit.
We did not have much cash, everything seemed closed, and nobody spoke english.
We did manage to find another one, with the help of lots of sign language, and while Debit cards did not work, we were able to get money out from our Master Card.
From there we bought our bus ticket, and went ot get some food. That was an adventure as well, with some finger pointing and the locals getting quite a laugh at our expense. We managed to eat teh meal but did not get any rice (surprising since this is China after all).
We got back to the bus station at 5:45 with our bus schedueled to leave at 6:00.
When we bought the tickets we had a choice of 6:00, 6:10, 6:20 or 6:30.
We chose the first one.
However when we got to the station, there were 3 buses with large lables on them
6:10, 6:20, and 6:30. No sign of the 6:00 bus
We tried to ask but got yelled at, but we found others with the same ticket and they just sat and waited. Apparently our bus was late and that was it.
All three buses left and at 6:40 our bus finally showed up. We boarded it and were on our way. This was to be a 12 hour ride to Kunming, capital of the province f Yunnan.
The bus was great. We have been on some busses who have one column of 2 seats and one column of 1 seat, so they are all wide and fold almost all teh way down.
We had also been on buses in India that had two columns of beds.
This bus had three columns of beds. Each bed was maybe 16 inches wide, and the walkways were no more than 14 inches acoross. But they were beds and were comfy enough.
This is the time to mention that in China, every male smokes. I am much more the minority because I do not smoke than because I am white. And everyone hoarks and spits. This includes on the bus. The strange thing was, people would light up at 3 am, while the bus was moving. Its like they woke up to have a smoke. Crazy. When the bus stopped, they would get out of bed, and stand beside it and have a smoke, but not get off the bus. This really bothered us. But we did surivive the night and got Kunming by 6:30 am.
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