The last leg of the Yunnan adventure

We woke up early the next morning to catch a bus back to Qiaotou. I took a shower then and all the lights had burnt out so it was a lovely warm shower in the dark since the sun had not risen yet. And then we were off. Sean’s had ordered a van for us which had exactly seven seats so it was perfect. It was probably one of the scariest car rides of our lives. We think the driver was playing a game of how close he could get to the edge of the road without falling down the mountain. Some of the roads had small walls to protect the cars but most of them just had free falls into oblivion. The road was also not well paved and the shocks on the car weren’t the greatest so we were jumping all over the place. Our driver had warned us that there had been a landslide the day before and that we might have to change vehicles halfway through the journey. Sure enough we ended up getting out and walking on foot across the landslide.There were a bunch of workers and construction vehicles there trying to clear out the rocks and debris as quickly as possible. We caught another van on the opposite side and headed into town. In Qiaotou we found a driver and another van to take us back to Lijiang. This was a very nice ride with the mountains in view and a route through all the local villages. We saw herds of goats and cows being walked through the streets. There was a guy on the side of the road holding multiple large snakes. And there was a range of food everywhere. In this part of the country there is a lot of corn. So you can see piles and piles of ears drying out in different buildings. They also have a lot of peppers growing in the area so there were tons of strings of the largest red peppers I’d ever seen. We arrived around lunch time in the old town part of Lijiang. Lunch was the first thing on our mind and we found a jiaozi place and ordered 120 of them for the seven of us (those boys eat so much!). Then we headed out into the town. Lijiang old town is a tourist section with a lot of shops lining the traditional Chinese streets. So mostly we went shopping. The Naxi people are the only group that still uses a picture system for their written language. Many of the souvenirs had phrases and words from the ancient dialect. There were also a number of stalls where people were creating things that moment to sell later on in the day. Marie and I each bought a burned wood drawing as the man was sitting making more with quick easy strokes. Eventually shopped out we started searching for a café to sit and rest for a bit. We saw a sign pointing up that said Stone Crow Rooftop Bar – we had to check that out. As we climbed the stairs Ben and I were at the top and what did we find when we reached the bar? Wayne, Barry and Sonya! We joined up again and spent a couple hours hanging out above all the buildings of the town. The view from the bar was great you could see old Chinese rooftops as far as you could look and they finally led into the base of the mountain. Eventually we had to go and catch our sleeper bus back to Kunming. We got KFC (#3) on the way and reached our bus with time to spare. This bus was much better than the first one. We each had our own beds and they were long enough to decently fit everyone. Reaching Kunming around 4am we decided to search for a McDonalds (we were KFCed out). As we were standing around outside the station who came up to us? Barry and Sonya! Their bus had been an hour behind ours but hadn’t stopped along the way like ours had so they caught up. So the nine of us headed out looking for food and a place to rest. We wanted to end up back at Salvador’s once it opened so we told the taxi to just take us there and figured we’d find an open restaurant around that area. A half hour later walking through the dark streets we hadn’t had any luck. Ben and I ran over and asked a police officer if he knew of any McDs in the area and he said no. We went back to the group and decided we might as well head back when the police officer drove over to us. He pointed a bit farther down the street. We followed his lead and headed that way. At the corner his car was waiting for us and he pointed for us to turn left. We turned and saw a KFC. #4. Jess pointed out that it was great that despite the language barrier he had completely understood that we were more looking for anything that was open rather than specifically a McDonalds. After an hour or so in KFC we headed back to Salvador’s to wait for it to open – we were hoping 8am. As we were sitting there we started talking about the upcoming overnight train ride. We hadn’t gotten sleepers because they were sold out so we had hard seats for the 26 hour journey. Cliff asked when we were getting those tickets and Jess and I worriedly replied that they had already been handed out and that everyone should have theirs. Well…ten minutes later it was evident that his ticket was missing and it was not coming back. Jess, Cliff and I decided to head for the train station and see if we could replace the lost piece of paper. Nope. The ticket agent said that someone could have picked it up and then two people would have tickets for that one seat. The next train that was available wasn’t until the following day. We headed to the airport next and were able to easily get a flight for him home. It even left just a few hours from then and would get him into Guangzhou with plenty of time to get back to Shenzhen. Jess and I headed back to Salvador’s with one less member of the group sadly.
The train: We sat in Salvador’s for an hour or so and headed for the train station early (we didn’t want any chance of missing it again). We got on and found our seats. It turns out that the standing and sitting cars of the train are the same. So anyone who bought a ticket for standing room was standing in the aisles of the sitting cars.
If a seat opened up for any decent amount of time a stander would quickly sit down for as long as possible until shooed away. The seats were sections of two or three that faced each other. Five of us had five of the six seats in one section with another American filling the sixth seat and then Jess had the random seat across the way in a four seat section. She and I ended up making friends with the family in that section and we taught them how to play rummy and they taught us a Chinese card game called dou di zhu. The first couple of hours of the ride were pleasant since we were playing cards and conversing with each other. Then the night set in and that was when everything went downhill. I had moved back over to our large section of seats for the night. Since early in the train ride, a grandmother with a baby had taken over one of our seats. Since she was old and had a baby we had just let her sit and had rotated standing or went to sit over with the other Chinese family. When it came time to sleep I ended up sitting next to her. First off the whole train car was hot and sticky – the air conditioning for our section was on the fritz and not working as well as the other cars. Second unless you were close to the window you really didn’t have much to prop yourself up on so you just had to sleep sitting straight up. So I was able to get an hour or two at a time but kept waking up throughout the night. At about four or five am is when my China rage started to set it. I was hot, dirty (we hadn’t showered for two days at this point due to overnight buses and trains), tired and just plain exhausted from the long week. The grandma who was sitting next to me kept bumping into me and waking me up. She would also just lean on me for support. The baby she was with wouldn’t stop crying or fidgeting. After gently pushing on her to get her off me, with no success, I moved across to the other side of the bench right in front of her. This worked for a little bit. Then the baby really started fussing and you could tell he was having problems with his diaper. So she took it off…The baby had on split pants (pants with a large opening in the private area) and I could just see when the baby had to go to the bathroom him peeing all over me since I was right in front of him. Luckily after a while she found a new diaper and put it on him. That’s when the spitting started. She just started spitting on the floor and rubbing it into the ground with her foot. Eventually she pulled over the garbage can and spat into that instead. To add to this her husband was sleeping literally under my bench. You could see his legs sticking out into the aisle way. So if the baby started crying he would sometimes reach out from under me and tap a bottle or something against the ground to get the baby’s attention. Overall this family was just driving me crazy. I felt like a spoiled white American but I just wanted to get out of that train and into a clean environment where this family was nowhere in sight. The other “fun” part of this ride was that the bathrooms were not the nicer ones from the sleeper sections of the train. First, most of the standers on the train took over the bathroom area, either sitting or sleeping all throughout the hallway. So if you wanted to get to the bathroom it was a game of hopping over people without waking them up. Then the squatter toilet was actually open to the outside so a large draft would come right up out of the hole at you. It was lovely. This was by far probably the longest 26 hours of my life. But we finally arrived and were able to get tickets from Guangzhou back to Shenzhen about an hour later. We went and grabbed KFC (#5) and waited for our train. This one was a blessing. It was clean, pristine, there was soap and toilet paper in the bathroom, everyone had enough room to spare. Beautiful.

Arriving in Shenzhen, Andrew, Greg, and I hugged everyone goodbye and headed for Nanshan. A 45 minute metro ride, and two buses later I arrived back in my room around 5:00pm on October 7, 2010 where I took one of the longest showers I’ve ever had.

Random other stuff and inside jokes for my future lack of memory:

-Driving around in one of the taxis, a motorcyclist was in front of us with a complete dead pig! The big was laid out behind him with the hooves dragging on the ground as the cycle turned corners. It was comical/really sad at the same time.
-Cliff protecting Ben’s seat by strewing garbage all over the chair
-Baby/Person/Dog game
-Ben Laoshi
-“My pee is the color of limeade with sunglasses on” – Cliff and Andrew
-“I went to Guangzhou and all I did was eat KFC” – true story
-“Shenma the F***”
-Chookies – China cookies!
-“If I lay on the horn the sound waves will eventually push the other cars out of the way” – what we’re pretty sure runs through every Chinese driver’s head as they refuse to stop honking until their vehicle moves