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| The View From the Back of the Bus |
It’s raining in Beijing right now, but I don’t think it ever rains in Yunnan, where I spent my Fall Break and celebrated my 21st birthday. Yunnan is the southernmost mainland province in China and home to Kunming and Dali, Yunnan’s capital and one of China’s hidden gems, respectively. I spent six days exploring the two cities with two friends, Phil and Mike, and found myself constantly contemplating which experience I should write this blog about when I returned to Beijing. Would it be the lively Kunming bar scene? Or the oddly international Hump Hostel and its bizarre clientele? How about my 21st birthday celebration, which I can describe as nothing short of “epic?” No, cormorant fishing with locals in the Dali sunshine certainly trumped all those. But what about riding galloping horses up Dali’s lush green mountains afterward? No can do–that would be ignoring the Stone Forest. While all of these activities and sights remain memorable, I can only declare one aspect of my trip as truly unforgettable. A bus ride.
The three of us decided it was in our best interest to leave Dali in the evening so we would arrive back where we started our journey, in Kunming, early enough to take a bus to the Stone Forest which lies an hour and a half eastward. Putting off making travel arrangements to the last minute had become our forte by that point, and when we found out the overnight train had already sold out, the three of us were undaunted and accepted, instead, a ticket onto a bus leaving at 10 PM and arriving at 5 AM that would double as our bed for the night. A massive meal at Dali’s Good Panda Restaurant (I could have also written about Yunnan food!) and a beer or two later, we were ready to leave. The three musketeers headed to the bus station.
The first clue should have been the fact that the bus ride from Kunming to Dali took only five hours. Perhaps the three wise men had assumed that the bus would cruise at a steady 40 mph in order to guarantee passengers a sound sleep (anybody who has ever taken the Fung Wah from NYC to Boston would have warned bus otherwise). The bus departed from Dali, drove 30 minutes, and then stopped. The three stooges had begun to watch “Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle” on a laptop and ignored what would soon become a two-hour delay in their progress toward Kunming. An odd characteristic of Chinese public transportation is that we were the only ones on the bus that brought any sort of bus-activity. Aside from my laptop I could not spot another computer, book, magazine, Ipod, Kindle, etc. As though it had been written by the ancients, just as Harold and Kumar dug into their Whitecastle burgers, the lights went out, we got yelled at for making too much noise, and the bus departed for Kunming,
Looking on the bright side, it is the first non-CET sponsored, long bus ride in China that I can remember that I didn’t unintentionally second-hand smoke a pack of cigarettes on. The reason for the lung luxury was that aside from the three amigos, the bus passengers seemed to all fall asleep with uncanny synchronicity as the bus left its station. Phil Fong’s nickname, “Xiao Fang” (Small Fong) played to his advantage in the back of the bus, as his wee legs fit snugly in his bed. Mike and I, though not gigantic, were troubled by the fact that our legs extended far longer than our mattresses. Our mattresses, by the way, were essentially a collection of fabric-covered two-by-fours. If one of the three of us managed to fall asleep, he would be awakened shortly thereafter by a bump in the road and find himself midair, only to come crashing back down onto the generous cushion of his two-by-fours.
As a side sleeper, my left arm was next-to-useless when the bus finally stopped, but we made it in one piece all the way to Kunming. Phil asked us to let him sleep in on the bus, and we let him, but Mike and I immediately retreated to our hostel where we slept until noon, thus eliminating any time-advantage gained from the overnight bus. We made it to the Stone Forest later, so I standby that the overnight bus was a decent decision given that the three of us had 1) almost missed our flight from Beijing to Kunming because we slept in too late, and 2) almost missed our bus to Dali because we slept in too late, but if I could do it all over again… You couldn’t pay me enough to get on that overnight bus.
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Posted by smccampbell on 2009-10-30 14:01:46 | Rating: | Views: 56
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