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Published: July 30th 2009
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I was lucky to get on the direct bus from Dazhai to Guilin. In
Guilin, I first had the feeling the city wasn’t really nice. However, after about half an hour, I reviewed my opinion. Especially the shopping area has an open atmosphere. I ate a very nice pizza there! Also the
river bank was lively and people were happy. The good thing about China is that the most people are tourists, but I don’t really notice that because they all look the same as locals (at least from my perspective).
I lost the receipt of the baggage depot, but they were very easy giving my bags back. Luckily!
The night train to Kunming left on time. In my again soft sleeper cabin, there were 2 French and a Chinese (who didn’t say a thing the whole trip). The French were in the beginning also not nice at all, but when I noticed that the guy spoke Chinese, I used him for some translation later on. The plan was that the journey for me would end at Shilin (there is a touristic site I wanted to see). However, when I woke up the next day at 7:00 the train had
Chinese students in another train
When they noticed me, they kept on waving and smiling and pointing at me stopped. Almost two hours later, I was wondering why we had not moved a single centimeter yet... It turned out that because of
heavy rains, a landslide made the rail road to Kunming unusable. Therefore, the train could only use a single track. As a result, I spent the whole day in the train and was actually really glad with my soft sleeper!
I skipped Shilin and went straight to Kunming. I don’t know how this would have been communicated to the train assistant without the translator! For lunch, we went to the
train restaurant. First, they said that there was no food, then we say they loaded a lot of food on a trolley, but we could also not get one of those... But after less then an hour, it was possible to get some food! Really strange!! But the food was really good (especially because it was made in a train)!
What I also found really interesting, was that nobody was angry or nervous or something like that. In Europe, when a train is already 5 minutes late, everyone gets annoyed and shouting and so forth. Here, nobody even left the train to get a bus
or something (the train was more than 6 hours late)! I probably would have done that if I knew where I was...
When I arrived in
Kunming, it seemed the worst time to enter a city... All the roads were blocked by traffic jams... I met some other backpackers, who wanted to go to another hostel. So my first plan was to follow them. When, after 2 hours, we still had not been able to find the right bus stop and when I found out that I didn't really found the right vibe with those people, I jumped on a bus to the hostel I was planning to go to before. When I booked a room here, a Chinese girl (practicing her English on me, at least that's what she stated on msn) attached herself to me. I guess it's fun to be with a Chinese for a while... and although the communication is not always the easiest, she is very nice... I didn't get her Chinese name, and her English name (Tinril) was already very difficult to pronounce in the right way. Although, if it is an English name, I wonder who pronounced it in a better way...
The next day, I tried a few streets in Kunming, but I didn't really appeal to me. Therefore, I choose to get on a bus on Dali. At 11 am I had a bus, which apparently didn't leave until 12... By the time the bus left, I had to pee really badly. Fortunately, the bus made a 1/2 hour stop after two hours. Of course, the bus did not leave me in the right town, so after pointing at the map, the driver got me on another minivan, which directly brought me to the right city. After all, I arrived at 5 pm at the hostel... So it had cost me a whole day to get to
Dali.
The only thing I did regret, is that I didn't take any pictures from the bus of the villages we passed. They again looked totally different than the houses I've seen before and afterward. They each had colourful circular paintings on the side of the house, which were all different from each other. Too bad...
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