Day 9 - Arrived at Lijiang

We have spent the day in transit today and it has been very draining...

We left our hotel in Xi'an this morning very early and went to the airport and caught our flight right on time to Kunming which was a 2hr flight. A bit of turbulance and not the nicest landing but we made it. We then had to wait 4 hours for our connected flight to Lijiang due to a delay. It was very boring - there is nothing to do at the airport but sit and wait. We finally got on the flight to Lijiang which is only 40minutes. You take off and then go into landing mode - quite funny really. This flight however is the worst one Tam & I have ever been on. OMG...we thought we were going to die - for real! The flight had the worst turbulance ever, if you could still call it that, we were on many occasions just dropping from the sky and it also felt like we were sliding left and right - sooooo scary. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry but crying was what I wanted to do. I've never been so scared in my life. When we landed, it was the smallest airport I will ever see, one room for arrivals which also has the baggage area. It was tiny!

We then got our transfer to Yu Man Lou Inn which was also interesting. It was in a little mini van and half way to the Inn, the driver pulled over and picked up a man - a friend i guess - and just continued on like it was ok - very strange. The driver also spoke on 2 different mobile phones the entire journey and tried to overtake every vehicle, oncoming traffic or not and also overtook around mountainess corners - a little disturbing for us as passengers just waiting to have a car crash.. It was suppose to be 4 star but it was definitely not. The room was tiny, the bathroom had a glass wall and you had to draw a curtain which wasnt big enough to give you privacy. Privacy didnt matter though as the bathroom had no door. Also, the front door of the room didnt shut fully so if you were not in the room and we went out for the day people can see into our room through a 5cm gap. The room had a tiny amount of toilet paper, no tissues, no kettle, no anything really. We decided almost instantly we just could not bare this for 3 nights so got onto the internet and found the Crown Plaza hotel. It took us ages to explain to the staff at the Inn who dont speak a word of English except "hello" that we wanted to leave and could they get a taxi. We couldnt even do this ourselves as we were up a hill on a one way road away from the main streets. We ended up speaking to our contact here, Peter, who explained we wanted to leave. The place was so cheap and the people really nice, we didnt bother to ask for money back, we just left.

We are now in our room at the Crown Plaza which is only 2 months old. The place is amazing and we have only seen it in the dark. Our room is HUGE and we have huge beds, large bath tub, massive shower to fit a whole family, huge flat screen TV on the wall, executive desk, couch chairs, etc. Basically it is 5 star and has everything! It is quite late now and we hadn't had dinner so we have just ordered room service. Lets hope tomorrow will be a better day.

On a side note, the weather here was 20 degrees today, which is a far cry from the -4 we had in Xi'an and Beijing. A few other things I have forgotten to mention about China is that people spit and sneeze, etc, no covering of the mouth, they spit no matter if someone is standing near by. People eat and chew with their mouth open and slurp anything, drink, noodles, etc. People also pick their noses constantly, even if your watching them - YUK!

Well thats all for today - too tired to think now

Night xo

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