Travel Days (Daze)

---

I'm here! The travel gods were on my side: all of my flights were on time and I got my luggage with no problem.

Thanks to Roxanne for the early AM wake up call and to Janice for the ride to the airport!

My flight from RDU to DC was on time and, although I only had 45 minutes, to catch the flight to Beijing, it was no problem. The flight was scheduled to be 14.25 long, but because we had a female pilot, we were efficient and only took 12.75 hours! It was a smooth flight and I slept for maybe seven hours. I also watched two movies and read "The Good Earth" which is an excellent book. The food was pretty fgood except for the fish-flavored cup-o-noodles they gave us in the middle of the flight. The Beijing airport is huge and extremely efficient. Once I got off the plane, it took only 30 minutes to clear Immigration, get my luggage, clear Customs, and recheck my luggage. I found a money exchange and also made sure my ATM card worked. I walked around the airport for over an hour and it is a mecca of capitalism! Every high end store you can think of is there and people were doing some serious shoping.

One interesting thing: after I rechecked my luggage I had to go back through Security with my back pack. The x-rayed it and the guy got a bit excited. He called another guy over and they said they needed to check my bag. The pulled everything out and were OK with everything except one of my two bottles of hand sanitizer which they took. I guess they didn't like the vanilla moisturising beads!

My flight to Kunming was fine and they even fed us on only a three hour flight. Again, my luggage came quickly and I hopped in a taxi and was at the hotel with 45 minutes of landing. I was able to reserve a spot for a trip to the Stone Forest on Monday. They need four to be able to go, but a party of three had been there shortly before I arrived so that worked out.

The fatigue was really kicking in so I just took a quick shower and went to bed. Kunming is 12 hours ahead of North Carolina so I only had to reset the date on my watch. More soon...

---