Suzhou-Shanghai-Kunming-Dali in one day

Back in Suzhou after one fabulous week in Yunnan. Wow. So many new experiences. So much to take in!

To start off with I guess I should say that since my mom is still here so I’m quite busy, in case I don’t make it to the computer every day. Another thing, I tried to blog from Yunnan but wasn’t able to access my blog without a proxy (I cannot believe it is still blocked in China! Arrrghhh!), and trying to find a proper proxy from an internet café in Dali didn’t really feel like my thing. Besides, the computer I was using kept shutting itself down.

But, back to Yunnan. What did we do there then? Well, to start off from the beginning: On Monday, we got up super early, took a car to Shanghai, and then flew into Kunming. From there we managed to get to the wrong bus station, namely the west station. We had been told that buses to Dali would leave quite often, so imagine our surprise when we asked a woman at the ticket office when the next bus to Dali was leaving, and she said: “In 2.5 hours.”

Nice one. Not.

Since we were carrying some seriously heavy bags (I know I know, bagpacking is all about travelling light, but I simply do not possess that ability, and neither does my mom, so it wasn’t only me whining about a sore back 5 minutes into carrying my rucksack around) and had already had a late brunch (a detour from the airport before we ventured to the wrong bus station) we had nothing to do but to… wait. And wait. And wait.

2.5 painfully long hours later a man that probably qualifies as The Rudest Man I’ve Met in China came and yelled at us to get into a small, smelly, terribly unsafe-looking version of a minibus. We obliged, and he drove off, in the usual road-rage-race speed. He refused to answer any of my questions (such as: “will you please slow down?!” or “Hey, where are we going?” and “Why aren’t there any other passengers?”) and when he suddenly steered the car into a small little building area we where a line of men stood watching the car pull in, we were getting ready to get robbed.

Fortunately, the men just glared at us, and the Angry Man got out and said something to me I didn’t understand. When I ran after him and asked he started yelling at me that I was stupid who didn’t understand Chinese (cheers) and then he went to one of the men and started talking to him, without taking his eyes of us. I went back to the minibus where we felt feeling everything but comfortable and probably not being many meters closer to Dali than we had been some 20 minutes ago. I was seeing some crazy scenarios in my head about what was going to happen next when a large bus suddenly pulled up (from nowhere) and a very thin Chinese girl waved for us to hurry inside.

We threw our bags in the truck and hurried inside, all while Angry Man kept watching us. Once seated the tiny thin girl handed us a bottle of water and asked if we were going to Dali. Finally! That was the first good moment of that day.

However, whoever told me it was a mere 3 hour bus ride to Dali now “with the new highway” is to think again. It took us 5 hours with that bus, although I should mention that we stopped at one of the Dirtiest Places Ever where we were told we could enjoy 30 minutes of rest/peeing/eating.

Mom had her first encounter with a toilet stall without a door that you can close behind you, but once she had overcome her fear we headed to the restaurant and ordered, ate, and paid within a time frame of 10 minutes. I’m personally pretty impressed. Although I guess the fact that I was so hungry I was about to start nibbling on my water bottle had something to do with it.

We arrived in Dali quite late, sometime around 10 pm. The bus dropped us off in the new town where a bunch of taxi drivers competed about getting us into their cars and drive us to the old town. We picked a guy and another two bagpackers magically showed up, asking us if they could go with us as they didn’t speak one iota of Chinese. Sure they could.

During the ride mom and one of the bagpackers (a young girl) bonded over the trauma of seeing a toilet with no door that you can close, meanwhile I chatted away with the taxi driver. He proved to be the happy, chatty kind, not only driving us to the old town for a cheap price, but also telling us everything we needed to know about Dali (weather forecast, local specialities, sightseeing must-do and must-not-do) and assuring us that he’d help us to find a good hotel.

Me and mom were knackered and ended up settling for the first place he took us to: a rather fancy hotel that was a whopping 260 yuan/night (I say whopping because it was compared to what we paid for our rooms during the rest of our stay). It looked clean and had big beds that we immediately fell into. The other two travellers continued on with the happy taxi driver who kept his promise and took them to a cheap, but nice hotel. We know this because we bumped into them the next day, and they told us the driver had even insisted on everything from carrying their bags to doing the haggling for them, since he was so keen that they would end up happy. Quite a champ if you ask me.

So, that’s the story of the (fairly boring) day one where nothing really happened but we still made our way to Dali. Tomorrow I’ll write about Dali, then about Lijiang, and then eventually about the best adventure of the whole trip: the Tiger Leaping Gorge.