Getting into mainland China was as easy as everything else in Hong Kong; we got on a brand new luxury bus, were given our free bottles of mineral water, and left exactly on time. Compared to travel in India, this was like being on an episode of the Jetsons. We stopped at Hong Kong immigration to exit, again at China customs to enter, and we headed, full of optimism, for Guangzhou. It was only after passing the last road marked on our Guangzhou Lonely PLanet map that we started to worry a little. Ah, the capricousness of Chinese buses. Almost never in our (admittedly brief) experience here do the buses actually end at a real bus station. In this case, our journey ended in the far south of Guangzhou, in front of a huge hotel. Sigh. Fortunately, Guangzhou had a brand spanking new metro and many signs (more than we deserve) are in English.
We stopped at a bank to get some yuan, since China uses a different currency than Hong Kong, and met an American ex-pat, John, and his Chinese wife, Jihua, who gave us tons of helpful info, found us a decently priced hotel (difficult in rich Guangzhou), and had us over for an extravagant dinner of sushimi and plum wine (heaven in a glass!) and steak (forgot to mention the vegetarianism, but Phil ate enough for both of us). Well fed and well rested, we got on the train to Kunming, in the Yunnan province of south-west China.
I don't think that I realized what a truly big country China was until we had been on the train for 18 hours, and were still just over halfway. I can't complain, though, because "hard sleeper" on a Chinese train is nothing of the sort: sheets, pillow, comforter (!), and, in the corridor,these great fold-down padded seats at a table for eating noodles or playing cards or staring out at the nearly constant farmland of rural China. These are all possible activities one can engage in; to be honest, I gave into the deep, genetically-mediated coma all Mahaffy women get in moving vehicles, and slept almost the whole way. Poor bored Phil.
We arrived in Kunming and, after finding our first choice of hotel had been shut down, ended up at the Camellia Hotel: our first dorm room of the trip. The rooms are really nice and the showers (though lacking doors, giving it that gym-class-lockerroom feel) were incredibly hot, but it's still a little strange to be married, kiss your husband goodnight, and then climb into a bunkbed above him. It's like you're at some co-ed adult swim camp or something. Plus, we were cursed with an industrial snorer; he only escaped a group smothering by rolling onto his stomach, effectively muffling himself.
The next day we looked around Kunming, ate at a veggie restaurant that makes fake meat dishes (I had some disturbingly realistic soybean duck), and watched some BBC at the hotel (not every day can be filled with culturally rich experiences, you know). The next day was more educational. We went to the Bamboo Temple, about 15 km outside of Kunming, to see the incredibly detailed clay statues housed there. They were created by the famous Chinese sculptor Li Guangxiu and depict characters in action; my favorite was of a guy being bitten by his pet (which looked like the love child of a squat dog and a fish), and the look of surprise on his face was perfect. According to our guidebook, Li disappeared soon after the statues were finished (he did 500 of them), apparently because some of the more unflattering figures too closely resembled those in power. I guess they didn't appreciate his humor...
We left for Dali on a "sleeper bus", which has three rows of (VERY short) beds and a slightly larger shelf at the back called the "family bed". The name "sleeper bus" implies that we would actually sleep on this trip, and it may have been possible, bumpy roads aside, if it weren't for the fact that the bunks below ours were occupied by the co-captains of the Olympic Smoking Team, who were obviously feeling the pressure for this summers Games from their nearest rivls, the French. They smoked constantly. I belong to the most vocal group of anti-smoker: the ex-smoker. It's true that no one complains louder about smokers than the ex-smoker, but these two were heavy smokers even by iron ore plant standards; they even smoked while asleep. I think that men here have been taught that they can only get oxygen into their lungs through a cigarette; it is the only explanation for the almost desperate chain smoking we've seen. So, we tumbled off the bus in Xiaguan (NOT the Dali bus station, of course) smelling like the inside of the Marlboro Man's lung (aka eau de Bar Night), and got a taxi-truck to Old Dali with four Germans who'd had a worse ride than us: they were packed into the five person "family bed" at the back of the bus. With a family. We crammed into the closed bed of a pickup (a popular way to transport livestock, by the way) and headed to Dali.
We had heard that it was a little touristy, but we weren't prepared for the onslaught of Chinese tour groups that descend on Dali every day. The town itself has some character; the buildings have been rebuilt (after an earthquake in 1925) in a more or less traditional style, and there are small canals crossed by stone bridges everywhere, but there isn't much to the town except souvenir stalls and...no, that's it. Westerners are definitely a minority, which means that we were basically ignored by the hawkers; they know it's the Chinese tourists who spend money on plastic Naxi flutes and photos of women in "native" dress, not cheap, near-broke backpackers. We climbed to the Zhonghe Si temple and took the cablecar down, and, with that, pretty much exhausted our sight-seeing options in Dali. Onto Lijiang...
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