China Here We Go
Kunming,
China
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Well I was pretty glad I bought my laptop in the end as it gave me things to do during my 5 hour wait in Bangkok for my China Eastern flight to Kunming. It took a little bit of searching around to find the best free wifi spots but then I was able to speak to Matt and Kim back home on Skype and Messenger and all sorts...in between running to Burger King to charge my laptop as it seemed impossible to find a spot with a comfy seat, power and wifi. In the end we boarded our flight at midnight. The only westerners were a group of Norwegian school kids and me. I got sat next to the teacher who had brought 20 20 year old kids out to Thailand and now to China. I was asking him how this was and he said it was fine, none misbehaved and they were all equal. Amazingly they had a zero alcohol tolerance policy and he had even left them to their own devices for 3 days down in Krabi...can you imagine the carnage that would have ensued if that had been a group of kids from the UK. I also missed a trick as they had spent the entire 5 hours in the lounge courtesy of China Eastern...the fact that I never thought to ask for that annoyed the hell out of me. I bet they even had power sockets and comfy seats in there. I must have been tired on the plane because I fell asleep with REM in my ears and apparently they couldn't wake me at all to collect my meal. The meal was the largest assortment of stuff I have ever seen, 2 bread rolls, some noodles with pork, a big hunk of cake, some chocolate wafers, a kitkat, some biscuits and various little packets of Chinese snacks.
So I arrive in Kunming airport at 3am with nowhere to go except a vague inkling of getting a bus sometime in the morning to Lijiang. So in the end I just sat in an empty café with some mosquitoes for company. I tried to sneak upstairs into the nice dark departures area for a kip but the security guard nabbed me. I lasted in the café for about all of 20 minutes before the security guards decided it was time to close the airport...I had never heard of airports closing before but this is China I suppose. In reality it turned out to be quite a good turn of events for me as it meant I ended up in the same situation as 5 Chinese people and we became instant friends. Two girls especially latched onto me (Cecil and Angel though I am sure that wasn't their real Chinese names) and practiced their English on me. One turned out to be doing a PhD in maths in Kunming and her English was quiet good. So we sat outside Kunming airport till 6am - I got told pretty quickly that 'your shoes are not suitable for here' referring to my flip flops, I thought this was due to cultural reasons or something but in reality they meant due to the amount of killer mosquitoes that were everywhere.
Neither if my two new friends were going in the same direction as me but another girl, who didn't speak any English, was and she was tasked with looking after me...and look after me she did; she didn't make a move without me until we got onto the bus to Dali (I wasn't even going to Dali but she wanted to make sure I got that far OK and made sure the driver knew where I wanted to go when she got off). I am sure I would have managed without their help but it did make a massive difference as they don't do much English or even roman letters in China.
The buses are pretty decent with good leg room and they even have LCD monitors showing Chinese TV (this sort of raunchy, almost soft porn, Chinese version of Desperate Housewife's) and Hollywood films dubbed over in Chinese. Understandably I fell asleep pretty much when I got on waking up only to buy some pot noodle soup thing when we stopped at the services. If the buses are nice this country definitely has an issue with public toilets. At the bus stops etc there are no such thing as cubicles instead there is just a row of men crouching (some on their mobile phones at the time) with their trousers down craping in a porcelain trench...I really hope I don't get the dose of the shits here...
The other thing that instantly strikes me about the Chinese is how angry they seem to get when arguing. I had been warned about this before but when you first see it you think there will be fisticuffs any second but then everyone is best friends again. I guess my perspective just comes from dealing with Chinese people through work where generally they were totally calm and voices were never raised.
So with all my little guardians looking after me (even the bus driver drove the entire bus from one bus station to the other one for me in Dali and then took me to the ticket office to make sure I got the correct ticket for Lijiang) arrived in Lijiang at 4ish and set off to find somewhere to stay. Once again I must have misinterpreted the map as I ended up walking around for an hour before finding the old town and then spent another hour trying to find somewhere that a woman had given me a card for before finally just starting to ask places (I also stopped in at the #1 in the Lonely Planet but there looked like construction work and then a couple of people I met said people only stayed there one night due to business and the amount of noise etc). So in the end I ended up in a little courtyard behind a café paying 2 quid a night with free internet (and wifi meaning I am writing this on the new computer from my bed). The other thing that threw it for me was when I asked if she could do laundry for me and she said 5 Yuan...I thought that was per item but the she got me by the arm and took me to the family washroom and showed me the washing machine (one of those ones like my gran used to have with the separate washing and spin drums) and told me it was 5 Yuan to use their washing machine. I liked that for some reason.
More in Lijiang itself in the next installment...
