Sorting a few things out (Kunming, Yunnan Province, China)

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(Day 108 on the road)22 hours on the train and a few instant noodle-pots later ("Have instant noodles, will travel" as Karen called it) I arrived in Kunming. I also managed to loose another hat on the train, the 4th one since I set off for this trip, perfect Ben. On the plus side, the Lonely Planet had said the trip from Guilin to Kunming was 26 hours, so I was positively surprised when the train pulled into Kunming station after only 22h.

What is strange about these night trains is that all the Chinese travellers sleep fully dressed. In Russia and Mongolia, people would go through proper preparations to go to bed, i.e. changing into their pyjamas and so on before going to bed. In China, the people just flop on their bunks, not much bothering about blankets or anything, and just sleep. Also, they go to sleep extremely early and get up early as well. Typically, most of the train is passed out by 2100h at the very latest (lights are shut off at 2200h sharp on every night train), and up again by 0500h in the morning. This does not really fit with my typical sleeping pattern, but it is nice to a sit in a quiet train in the evening, and of course earplugs help against the noise in the mornings.

The first stop for me in Kunming was the Post Office, where my mum had posted me two letters to, my new credit card and - more importantly - my tickets for the Olympic Games. The pickup was everything but straight-forward and let break some sweat: They had a book in which they manually recorded all the incoming mail including the registration numbers. After I had carefully checked it twice and was starting to get a little nervous, they told me that this was only for parcels and that they had another book for letters. Sure enough, my name was in there, but only once (I was expecting two letters). So they went to get the letter, but instead of finding the one in the book they came back with the one that was not recorded in their book. They told me that was the only one available and the number in the book was apparently wrong. I however had brought the two numbers of the letters I was expecting with me, and it matched the one in the book. Then they said "Oh this letter lost then". But how can it be lost when it is recorded in the book? So then they told me to come back Monday. I asked them to please look again, and very reluctantly they looked again. And sure enough, there it was, at the bottom of a pile of different letters. Anyway, guess nothing is easy, but I was very happy to have my new credit card and my three Olympic tickets in my hand.

The next stop was an electronics shop to have my Ipod repaired. This somehow did not work out at all, though the guy gave his best. After being helped by two extremely friendly students (the ones English name was "Miracle", cool) who took hours helping me, i ended up at another Apple shop. The staff there took seven (!) hours to save most of my data as the player would switch off every few minutes which made it all very tedious. However, they were also unable to repair it, so in the end I bought a new device from them and will be sending the other one off for repairing. All in all, I occupied one guy at the shop for 10 hours, he went through tremendous efforts to help me, and I was very grateful!

Apart from that, Kunming wasn't a very attractive city and I didn't like it very much, so I am leaving here for Lijiang tonight by overnight bus. Also, the hostel I stayed in ("The Hump") was huge and impersonal, too many people and way too noisy. What was nice however was the much cooler climate here with temperatures between 25 and 28 degrees, much more enjoyable to the 35 degrees I have had for the last few weeks. By friends back home I had been told that (supposedly) terrorists had blown up two public buses in Kunming the same morning killing three and injuring 14 people, but here no one knew about it and we also didn't notice anything unusual. Then again, that does not seem surprising with a city of more than one million people in it. I assume that the security measures for the Olympics will tighten up in the three weeks remaining until the start of he Olympics.

Next stop: Lijiang (Yunnan Province, China).



To view my photos, have a look at pictures.beiske.com. And to read the full account of my journey, have a look at the complete book about my trip at Amazon (and most other online book shops).

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