The road to Kunming

After another couple of days in Yangshuo doing more trekking down the banks of the Li river, bamboo rafting down the same river when I couldn't be stuffed to walk anymore and climbing Moon Hill (月亮山) to get more panoramic aerial views of the Guilin-Yangshuo area it was time to move on. Yangshuo is a 3-street town that was just too small for Eddy Chan, the whole place smells like a mixture of human sewerage and burning coal and its no surprise that I got a case of 拉肚子 otherwise known as Guilin belly. Simon also left me at this point to go back to HK after being satisfied that his apprentice (me) had learnt how to be a true stingy backpacker in China (i.e exist on 50rmb/AU$8 or less per day including accomodation and food).

The road to Kunming is long - I had to take a 6 hour coach ride down to Nanning, the tropical capital of Guangxi near the China-Vietnam border, stay overnight at Nanning and then take the overnight train from Nanning to Kunming the next day. This is all for the sake of saving about 300rmb/$50 because I didn't want to pay extra for a 2 hour flight from Guilin to Kunming. However I really love China trains, especially the overnighters, they give you time to reflect on life and I'm writing this blog entry enroute - no there's no net on the train, I've written it on a piece of paper so I can type it up when I get to Kunming.

Nanning was ok - its a very generic Chinese city, there was nothing to see or do there, it's kinda like the Adelaide of China with wide streets and a slow pace of life. To describe the people, you'd have to get Cabramatta and Hurstville, mash them together and expand it to the size of Adelaide - the people here speak Canto with a funny accent, there's Viet on a lot of the shop signs for the Viet population and everyone looks dodgy, just like in Cabra and Hurstville. On the public buses I'd see people carry live chickens inside baskets and take the bus - it was a new experience seeing livestock and people together on public transport.

I ran into Yuka again when I caved in to my need for a 20rmb KFC meal after more than a week living solely on cheap noodles, dumplings and rice. A zinger burger never ever tasted so lush - the crispy chicken and the mayonnaise...mmmm and ice-cold Sprite was never so refreshing until then.

Yuka's a Japanese girl that I'd met at the Guilin Flowers hostel - she was on her way to Vietnam - we chilled out together for a day at the Xinhua bookstore (she needed a Viet phrase book and I needed reading material for the train) and at the central park at Nanning cos there was nothing better to do. I bought for myself a selection of Lu Xun's essays (with English translations on alternate pages) - my history professor would've been proud of me haha. 鲁讯 was one of the founding fathers of modern China, he was a doctor-cum-philosopher who wrote satire on the Chinese society in the early 20th century as a means for changing Chinese society to adjust to the Western influences of the time, the stories still hold true for today.

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I'm in Kunming now - what an enormous change from the rest of China, I can't put my thumb on it yet but I felt extremely foreign when I arrived this morning. The people here look different, and act differently - the dodgy 'English teacher' wasn't crapping on when he told me that Kunming wasn't a just another Chinese city. The air is clean here, the sky is blue, it's really cold (weatherwise) - strangely enough I found parallels with the outskirts of Tokyo and Kunming city - maybe the people here are more polite, there are no touts and the general populace is more interested in living life than making money. Then there's the language barrier - I haven't yet adjusted to the Kunming accent and whatever dialect they speak here it totally unintelligible to me. At least I was able to have a hot shower and a shave at the hostel I'm living at now. I'll be here for a couple of days before I move further up into the mountains in North Western Yunnan to see Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-la.