Dali-Kunming-Jinghong-Mengla-Jinghong

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The title says it all. This is the story of my fruitless journey to the border and back again.

The jouney started on the wrong foot. It is inevitable that travel companions will have little tiffs on the road. Trying to get from Old Dali to Dali City I had a fight with my beloved and contant companion, Lonely Planet. It started as an innocuous dispute over the meaning of the word "terminus". It was my understanding that terminus means "the end, the final place" and it was based on this definition that I caught the number 4 bus to the terminus, or, until it stopped and I was kicked of.

This is where the problem started. According to LP I was only a short walk north of the long distance bus station. So, in the hot hot heat, and burdened by an excessive amount of souvenir shopping, I headed south. After 20 minutes and no sign of the bus station I was confused and a little concerned. I thought I must have gone past it, so I headed back north. Back at the bus terminus I was still confused and a little flustered. Then I thought maybe I had underestimated the scale and not walked far enough, so I headed south again.

I walked for 45 minutes and there was no long distance bus station. Couldnt figure it out. I consulted LP again, but he was in a vague and unhelpful mood and offered no solutions. I was confused and starting to get a bit angry. I had been walking for nearly an hour and a half with my luggage in 40C heat. I didnt know where I was on my map, I couldnt find any street signs and I couldnt ask anyone for directions. I had no idea where I was or how to get to where I wanted to go and it was all LP's fault. With not too many options on my side I decided to keep walking.

So I kept walking and eventually came to a street sign. I was able to figure out where I was on the map, where I had come from, and what the confusion had been. It turned out that when LP said terminus, he actually meant some random bus stop along the way that I had well and truely gone past. Duh.

After two hours and with a little love lost between LP and I, I made it to the long distance bus station. But that was only the beginning of the adventure. I think it was because I was feeling so flustered and so exhausted that I made the following mistake.

There are two types of bus in China, regular and crazy. My experience so far had only been with regular busses, reasonably comfortable and reasonably efficient. The regular busses are the ones where you buy a ticket over the counter, sit in a waiting room and then board through a terminal. A young girl will check your ticket, seat you and then give you a bottle of water and you dont have to worry about anything. Things are a little different for crazy busses as I was to discover.

I climbed the stairs to the bus station dripping with sweat and a woman grabbed my wrist.
"kunming?"
"Huh?"
"Kunming, KUN-MING?"
"Um, yeah..."
And that was it, that was the mistake I made. I let myself be ushered to the womans bus. My tout wariness had shrivelled up in the sun.

The actual bus was pretty normal. What makes it a crazy bus is the extra-ordinary length of time it takes to get anywhere. The bus didnt leave the terminal until it was full. It took over an hour for the crazy wrist grabbing woman to fill it up. But that wasnt the end of it. Then we did laps around the block for half an hour with the crazy wrist grabbing woman yelling "Kunming Kunming" out the window. We picked up two more people and three baskets of chickens. But that still wasnt the end. We stopped at the entrance to the freeway for another half an hour while the crazy wrist grabbing woman stood in the middle of the road waving at cars yelling "Kunming, Kunming". We picked up a mother, a grand mother and three screaming children.

I was feeling very anxious by this time. The bus trip was only supposed to take 5 hours. With the walking and the block circling and the waving at cars it had already taken 4 hours and we hadnt started yet. It was 3 in the afternoon and I had to be in Kunming by 8 to catch the bus to Jinghong. I did NOT want to have to spend the night in Kunming. But that wasnt the end of it. At every exit to every town we pulled off the freeway to let people and produce on and off. Took plenty of deep breaths and checked my watch every 3 minutes.

It probably wouldnt have been so bad if it wasnt for the music. This isnt particular to crazy busses, a fair few regular busses are guilty of this crime too. The crime is playing very bad music very loudly. Music so bad that you want to spank it and make it sit in the corner. The recipe for making bad music is this: a bad song by someone like Mariah Carey, Rod Stewart or Celine Dion, get a Chinese person with bad pronunciation and bad phrasing to sing it, put synthetic kareoke style backing to it, make a crap burnt copy of it so the bass is fuzzy and the vocals too loud then play it really, really, really loudly through really, really, really bad speakers. It made my head hurt and there was no getting away from it.

So that was how a 6 hour journey turned into an 11 hour journey. But I made it to Kunming and I made it on a bus to Jinghong. Then I made it on a bus to Mengla and nearly 30 hours after I left Dali I arrived in my destination. The aim was to stay in Mengla for the night and travel on to Laos the next morning.

I needed money, which was cool because LP told me that there was a Bank of China in Mengla. I would find it in the morning, first I needed sleep. The hotel was filthy, more so than I was accustomed to, but I really didnt care. The next morning, not feeling exactly refreshed, I tried to find the BOC. Fruitlessly. There was no BOC in Mengla. I asked 5 people. The nearest BOC was 6 hours away in Jinghong. I had less than 50juan left and no option but to make the trip back to Jinghong that afternoon. It was my own stupid fault, you should never travel with insufficient funds. Lesson learnt.

The road between Jinghong and Mengla was insane. I had actually really enjoyed it the previous morning. It was a bumpy windy little road that weaved itself up, around and through some of the most spectactular rainforest flavoured mountains I had ever seen. The bus was as uncomfortable as a bicycle with no seat but the scenery made up for it. Unfortunately, however, on the way back to Jinghong my stomach decided it had had enough of being shunted around on bumpy bus rides, and if Id had money for breakfast or lunch I would have thrown them up. I spent the 6 hours with my head out the window feeling sorry for myself.

Tucked up in a nice hotel room in Jinghong with some delicious BBQ fish and the airconditioner on full blast I thought long and hard about the journey ahead of me. I had planned to spend two weeks in Laos, then two weeks in Thailand, finishing in Bangkok and then heading back to HongKong though Guilin and Yangshuo. Reflecting on how horrible the last little bit of travelling had been I thought about how long and painful it would be to bus from Bangkok to Hong Kong. It would be like going from Perth to Melbourne via Alice Springs on a small, slow, crouded, bumpy, uncomfortable bus. I decided that I didnt have the time or money or energy to follow through. So, I headed home.

You know you have made the right decision when you suddenly feel a great weight lifted off your shoulders. I didnt realise how burdened I had been by the experience of travelling so far and the prospect of 6 more long weeks. The next morning I was feeling light and happy when I got on the bus to Kunming, and all I could think about was being two weeks away from real bread and real salad.

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