Tuesday, October 26, 2004 (Kunming - China)
Good-bye to Chengdu but where is the taxi driver
taking us? Airport prepared for expansion. Don't they have tourists in Kunming?
Fun on the buses. Sometimes the language barrier can hide the fact that the
Chinese are friendly people. The romance of China starting to wear off a bit
now. The importance of a decent map. A radical change in our plans swiftly
executed. The ups and downs of a bizarre evening.
Day 232 (42). We got up without any problems
this morning and bid farewell to Sam’s. A taxi was once again conveniently
waiting for us outside of the hotel building. I guess that’s one of the
advantages of the hostel being part of a larger hotel. With people coming and
going all the time, it’s never very difficult to find a cab. Our backpacks
are now starting to get very heavy with all of the souvenir and other purchases
we’ve been making. I keep saying this but we will need to send another
package home again soon.
As usual, we
handed the taxi a piece of paper with our destination written on it in Chinese.
The hostel staff routinely writes things down for their guests and I’m
frankly not sure what we’d do without this little bit of help that we get
from time to time. We can and do sometimes rely on the guidebook to try to
communicate with the locals and the little pictogram flip chart that I have has
also proven to be very useful at times. The problem is that as soon as they
start talking, things frequently go
pear-shaped.
The taxi ride was about
half an hour or more out of town but there were several terminal buildings and
our driver drove around a couple of times before we finally found the correct
one. If I understood him correctly, the piece of paper that we handed him was
for the international terminal building whereas our flight left from the
domestic terminal. This little merry-go-round ride cost us an extra couple of
Yuan on the meter but trying to make an issue of that seemed like a fruitless
endeavour so we simply collected our bags and handed over the displayed
fare.
The airport terminal seems
relatively modern and has clearly been built with future additional capacity in
mind. There were quite a few gates but very few planes, today at least. There
was also a wireless network in operation in and around the airport and I was
able to connect to it from my laptop. Unfortunately, I could only get as far as
a page telling me to send a text message to a specific number to get a login ID.
Since we don’t have a cell phone any more, this put a brief stop to any
ideas of surfing the Internet so I sat and played games
instead.
It was a good job that
we’d brought our own snacks and things with us, as the prices in the
terminal building were ludicrous. You have to wonder that the logic of pricing
yourself out of consideration to the point of not selling anything at all. After
about an hour of tedium, our boarding call came and we got onto the very new and
modern aircraft for our two-hour flight to Kunming. What little we did
understand of the few English bits and pieces we heard being announced was not
very encouraging. The temperature was predicted to be a fresh twelve degrees
Centigrade. I was sure that we would eventually run into some brighter and
warmer weather the farther South we went but this is just not proving to be the
case. We’re both getting quite tired of wearing the same few bits of cold
weather clothing that we have with us and will be grateful to find the warmer
weather again.
There was a tourist
information office in the terminal building when we landed in Kunming but it was
unmanned. There was another little information kiosk near the exit and this was
staffed by a uniformed Chinese woman that did speak some English but her range
of conversational skills was limited and she came over as being very unfriendly.
Still with no idea where we were going, I decided to crack open the guidebook
and found a cheap hostel for us to head for. Trying to get any information from
the woman at the kiosk about which bus to catch was proving to be more trouble
than it was worth but we did learn that the number two bus went to the train
station and the guidebook told us which bus to take from there so off we waddled
to join the crowd near the bus stop at the far end of the car
park.
We got in what we thought was
the correct bus, only to be immediately ushered off again by the driver when I
showed her the little picture of a train on my flipchart. The woman driver did
seem quite friendly and with a lot of pointing at the bus stop sign board, she
was able to reveal the correct number of bus to take to the train station and as
luck would have it, this bus was just pulling up behind so we relocated with a
smile and a thanks. This time, the driver nodded at me after I showed her my
little train and were let out ten minutes later by one of the main train
stations. We found the next bus we needed just around the corner from where we
got off of the first and I repeated the name of the bus stop as best I could
from the Pinyin in the guidebook to the next bus driver. He did seem to
understand after a while and ten minutes and several bus stops later, he
motioned for us to get out. We spent the next half an hour under the seemingly
increasing weight of our backpacks trying to decide if we had got out at the
right bus stop after all. Irritation was by now well and truly starting to set
in. I made several attempts to ask people on the street where we were but could
find nobody with whom I could successfully communicate – another example
of the language barrier creating a mountain out of a molehill. It should be
noted that under any other circumstances, we would quite enjoy this
miscommunication and travelling about the city by bus trying to find a specific
destination. It’s all part of the experience and we very much enjoyed this
the other day. When laden with several heavy backpacks, however, it can be less
fun and more irritation. It was all very new and exciting to begin with but
we’ve been here for a few weeks now and simply want to get from A to B
with as little fuss as possible with all our stuff. The romance of being in a
far away and exotic place has all but worn off for us now here. Maybe it’s
getting high time to move on.
Drastic
situations require drastic measures so we found a bank and walked in hoping to
find someone that might speak English. The more educated people are here, the
more likely they are to be able to speak English and I was hoping that bank
employees might be further up the education chain than the average person on the
street. Of course, this is a stereotypical generalisation that doesn’t
always hold true but this seemed like a reasonable enough of a gamble to try to
find someone to help us out in this hour of need. Sure enough, we soon found a
young man that spoke fairly good English. He was one of the bank managers we
later learned and was extremely friendly and helpful. So much so, in fact, that
he was not content to simply point us in the right direction but he actually
walked out onto the street with us and insisted that he personally take us to
find the hostel we were looking for. He wasn’t sure where it was himself
but gleamed enough out of the guidebook to at least know that we were in the
right vicinity and was able to talk to shop owners along the way to get
directions.
The Chinese people are
warm and friendly. We always come to this conclusion when we meet one with whom
we can successfully communicate. The thing is, this often gets lots through the
language barrier. When someone is trying to talk to us in Chinese, our not being
able to understand them means that all we see is someone standing in front of us
making a lot of noise. For all we know, they could be trying to be very helpful
and friendly but it doesn’t always come over as such. The fact that the
Chinese often speak quite loudly and confidently is something that we often
interpret as aggressive, when this may not be the case at all. A friendly
encounter, such as this one with the helpful bank manager, is sometimes a
welcome and necessary reminder to us just how friendly and welcoming the Chinese
people really are.
Our newfound
Chinese bank manager friend did eventually manage to bring us to the hostel we
were looking for. It was tucked neatly away behind another building, down a
winding alley, with absolutely nothing to indicate that it was there. Unless you
already knew exactly where to go, I cannot see how anyone would find it –
and certainly not from the woefully inadequate description in the guidebook
– another example of it letting us down. As hostels go, this one seemed
fairly typical with all the usual trappings. The only obvious flaw was that
there was no heating in the room we were shown. Unfortunately, this turned out
to be the case for all their rooms and I supposed this was an indication of just
how warm it normally might be here, when there isn’t a cold front pushing
through.
By now we were both quite
tired, irritated and cold but I did my best to be patient with the nice young
girl at the reception desk whilst I tried to learn what I could about the
various options for travelling around Yunnan Province for the coming week that
we plan to be here. After we had finished with all of this, our moods had not
improved. All of the options we were presented with were not terribly
attractive. Neither of us is keen on long bus journeys but that seemed to be the
preferred way to travel here. Quite amazingly, train travel to some of the key
places around the province is not only more expensive, predictably, but can take
many more hours to reach the same destination. To cap it all off, the
receptionist told me that they were expecting much colder weather over the next
several days and Sandy was not going to tolerate cold weather with no heating in
the room.
We made ourselves
comfortable in the room and decided to go walkabouts and explore the surrounding
area. The hostel is located right next to a nice park with several lakes and
footbridges running through it. The receptionist told us where to go to find an
Internet café and we set off in that direction with one of the hostel
brochures in hand that had a map of the immediate area. We did our level best to
locate the Internet café but the area around the lake had quite a few more
features and roads leading away from it than the map represented and we got
thoroughly lost. In addition to the Internet café, we were also trying to
locate another cheap hostel that was also recommended by the guidebook but the
same bloody idiot that wrote the directions to our place must have written the
directions to it too. We eventually found our way home after a good solid hour
of walking through the cold. Nothing seemed to be going right for us at the
moment and we returned back to our room really quite depressed and
despondent.
We sat and pondered the
gloomy situation for a while in our room. Several things all seemed to be
culminating together. The continually deteriorating weather, the unattractive
transportation options and the feeling we both had of not really seeing anything
new any more, all conspired to lead us to the same conclusion. It was, in fact,
time we thought about moving on after all. We could stay and try to squeeze what
enjoyment we could out of this region of Chins but there are so many more
wonderful places waiting for us to explore, there really isn’t any need
for us to have to go out of our way to have a good time. Looking over the
spreadsheet of our planned migration around Asia and into Australasia, it seemed
like we would gain more from cutting short our remaining time in China, in
favour of spending more time exploring South East Asia. We are still bound by
the self-professed desire to get to Melbourne, Australia in time for Christmas
and this has always meant that we will have restricted time in South East Asia.
But finishing up here in China now, together with spending a few less days back
in Hong Kong before we fly off to Bangkok, this will give us an extra couple of
weeks in the region and might even allow us a little time to briefly explore
Vietnam too. The more we thought about it, the more it made sense and pretty
soon the decision was mutually made so we went back down to reception to
organise how we would now get back to Hong Kong and to make the necessary date
changes for our next RTW flight to
Bangkok.
We spent the best part of an
hour making these next arrangements in a very hectic and frantic atmosphere down
in reception. I had to correctly coordinate the trip from here to Hong Kong and
the subsequent flight out of Hong Kong to Bangkok and needed to make sure to
book one leg of this trip to happily marry up with the other. The first problem
was with finding the correct phone number for the relevant airline offices.
Apparently, the only method available here in Kunming of finding phone numbers
was only good for local numbers. Not even the English-speaking receptionist had
any idea about how to locate a phone number for the airlines. Fortunately, our
guidebook proved useful in this regard, as it had listings for all the airlines
in Hong Kong. We spent the next five minutes trying to figure out how to dial an
international number but I was eventually able to make a connection. The
ticketing agent at Cathay Pacific was very friendly and helpful and was able to
put a hold on the seats we needed for tomorrow. The receptionist had earlier
called the local travel agent about travel arrangements from here to Shenzhen
tomorrow morning and we were told that there was a good discount available for
the flight out so it was on the strength of this that we made the date change
for the Hong Kong to Bangkok flight but I had to call back to confirm some
important numbers on the ticket coupon before the flight could be confirmed. The
other alternative was to take the twenty-four hour across country train journey.
The flight would certainly be our first choice even if it was going to be a
little more expensive that the train. Whilst I was looking up the flight coupon
number for the airlines, the receptionist called back to the travel agent to
make the booking for the flight to Shenzhen. I got the distinct impression from
watching her talk on the phone that our fun and games were not over yet. Sure
enough, when she put the phone down, she reluctantly told us that it now appears
that there are no seats available with the discounted fares on the flight to
Shenzhen. We might be able to get on the flight but it was going to cost about
¥1,200 ($145) each. Ouch! Alternatively, we could take the long train
journey for just ¥480 ($58) each in the soft sleeper class. Otherwise, we
would have to hang around here for several more days and take a later flight
that did have a good discount available for it. This would mean more money for
food and accommodation to sustain us for the next few days so we decided to go
with the train option instead. The cold weather and absence of heating was very
much on Sandy’s mind at this point. The only problem now was with
availability of seats on the flight out of Hong Kong for the day after that
which I had just told the airline agent to hold our seats for. I called back to
Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong and was relieved to learn that there was plenty of
seats available for the next day so I went ahead and had them change the date
again.
Finally, we were now settled.
We remain for the one night that we paid for here in the hostel in Kunming and
tomorrow morning, we board the train bound for Guangzhou where, about
twenty-four hours later, we will hopefully be able to catch the two-hour ferry,
or a bus, across to Hong Kong. We still have some Hong Kong Dollars and our
Octopus public transport cards and so we will probably head straight for the
same place we stayed at last time and spend one night there before flying to
Bangkok the next morning. I can hardly believe just how much our plans have
changed over the short space of an hour or less. One minute we are enjoying
South West China and the next we are looking forward to Thailand in South East
Asia.
I paid for and, about an hour
later, received our two train tickets. The flight to Bangkok was confirmed and
all we now had to do was rest and sit out our one remaining night here. With
pretty much nothing else left to do, I set off in search of the Internet
café that we couldn’t find earlier. I was determined to find it this
time and first interrogated a much larger map of the city that hung on the
reception office wall for a while before I set out. I did eventually find it
after about half an hour of searching. It was quite a big place with probably
over a hundred terminals and most of those were occupied by kids playing role
playing and shoot ‘m up games. I asked for a terminal and was sat at one
but it had to be started first. I clearly must have upset the gods at some point
as the spotty faced kid then spent the next half an hour trying to get this
computer to work. He ultimately gave up and sat me in front of another. I paid
¥4,5 ($0,55) for just over two hours of Internet surfing. Amongst other
things, I was trying to get some information on the ferry between Guangzhou and
Hong Kong but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I did get a reply from
the guy at World Nomads about my travel blog web site. He apparently want to
know if I would be interested in earning some commission by putting a link to
their travel insurance web site on my home page. I told him to send me more
information.
It was now dark and I
decided to go home to see if Sandy wanted to go out to get something to eat. It
will be a long trip on the train tomorrow and I doubt we will enjoy the train
food very much. We set off in search of a restaurant after I returned but
fortune was still not smiling on us today. We passed several nice looking places
but none of them had English menus. We would have tolerated this if there were
at least some pictures to point at but even this was not to be. On one of the
main road crossings, there was what looked like a very nice looking option with
plenty of people in it so we decided to give it a try. Lots of people looked
like they were enjoying lots of good food so we thought our luck was starting to
change. We found a seat and a waitress of understood the concept of wanting to
first look at a menu before ordering and were pleasantly surprised to see not
only English and pictures on the menu but the prices were very good too. We set
about pointing at what we wanted to order but one by one, the waitress indicated
that what we were ordering was not available. Perhaps it was because it was late
in the evening (the restaurants in China close their kitchens relatively early)
but the only things that she seemed to think that we could order were such
exotic dishes as ducks liver or chicken heads and the like. Now really very
pissed off with the entire world, we just got up and left with the hump.
Determined to find at least something to eat, we wandered around the immediate
vicinity for a while before spotting a KFC. We were so glad to have found at
least the option of having something to eat that we didn’t even bother to
look any farther.
Just around the
corner from the KFC was, surprisingly enough, a Walmart superstore so we decided
to take a look for ourselves. Sure enough, it’s much like any other
Walmart superstore in America and sells just about anything and everything.
Luckily for us, this one had a supermarket section and we stocked up with bread,
rolls, noodles, drinks and just about whatever else we though we might eat on
the train tomorrow. Over the past week or more, I’ve been on the lookout
for a beard trimmer to replace the one I have with me that got a bit beaten up
in my backpack. With so few Chinese with facial hair, I’ve been supremely
unsuccessful at finding one but strangely enough, they had one here at the
Walmart. As a special bonus, it even runs on batteries so I won’t have to
worry about plugging it in wherever we
got.
After leaving the Walmart with a
couple of arms full of supplies, we ran into another one of those little DVD
stalls that sell what must surely be knocked-off DVDs. They had all the latest
blockbusters and at just ¥6 ($0,70) each, I couldn’t resist adding
another half a dozen or more to our now growing
collection.
Back at the hostel, we
fired up the laptop and sat through Tomb Raider, somewhat in anticipation of our
trip to Cambodia where we will visit Angkor Wat, which is featured in the film.
I fell asleep shortly before the end of the movie and it was a satisfying end to
what had turned out to otherwise be a pretty grim and depressing
day.
Posted: Tue - October 26, 2004 at 11:00 PM