Wednesday July 21
We got up nice and early this morning to meet Chris and his friend so we could all go to the bus station. We got all packed up and carried all our stuff out to the car, when Dan reveals that he looked up our itinerary and our flight out of Kunming the next day isn’t at 5 like we thought, but it’s at 3. So we lose 2 hours, and we’re already nervous about making it back in time because the guy in the hotel in Dali said the bus ride is like 7 hours. Everything we’d read though said it was only 4. We decide to ask Chris’ friend because he is from Dali. He says there is a lot of construction so the ride could take up to 8 hours.
We decide there is no way to make it to Dali and back in the time that we have and still have it be worthwhile. We look at the tickets to see if we can sell them or get a refund, and it turns out we would have been at a different bus station from Chris anyway. I was embarrassed at the lack of planning we had put into this. Chris had to get going to catch his bus, so we quickly decided to nix the trip to Dali and stick around Kunming for the next day and a half. We say goodbye and thanks to Chris and he’s off for his adventure in the wilds of Yunnan, surveying the native people.
We head back into the hostel, book another night and go back to sleep. I wasn’t feeling very well, so I think the extra sleep probably helped. We were pretty bummed about not being able to leave Kunming and all of our plans falling through but we still wanted to do something fun. Chris had mentioned hiking around in the West Hills, so we decided to give that a try. We looked it up in my guide-book, and it sounded pretty interesting. Plus there was a page in the back with Chinese translations, so we thought we’d be able to make it alright. There were also directions on how to get there by taking the bus. We decided to put our ultimate China-travel skills to the test and give that a try. We took the 5 bus to the end of the line where we were supposed to transfer to line 6 and take that the rest of the way. Alas, no line 6 to be found anywhere. I don’t know where we went wrong, but we couldn’t find the 6 anywhere.
We decided to get a cab, which we accomplished fairly quickly, and successfully pointed in the guide-book to communicate our desired destination. The driver dropped us off at the bottom of a cable car/ gondola. From the guide-book description it was hard to tell exactly where we were, or where we wanted to be for that matter. We thought we could avoid the gondola and just hike up, but after a while of hiking we determined the gondola was a necessity in starting our exploration. We picked it up at the mid-station.
When we got off we decided to eat, since we hadn’t really had any breakfast. There was a little place at the end of the gondola, so we stopped but they didn’t have an English menu, or pictures. Their produce was all just out on some shelves, so I pointed to some stuff, thinking it would get all stir-fried together. Dan pointed to someone else’s dish, not really knowing what it was. (Our pointing fingers are certainly getting a workout today!) Our meal was delivered and I had apparently ordered 3 separate dishes of sautéed veggies. Good thing I didn’t keep pointing! Dan’s noodle bowl had some mystery meat in it, which sort of turned him off of the dish. We ate mostly vegetables. There was a nice eggplant dish that was actually really good.
We finished eating and headed out, trying to get our bearings. We were at one end of a chairlift, but weren’t really interested in taking it. We kept walking, until we came to an area with some shops and restaurants. Suddenly it started pouring rain. There were a bunch of buses parked next to an awning/ covered area so we hunkered down under there for a while. It slowed almost as quickly as it stared. The presence of the buses made us realize that A: we didn’t have a plan for getting home and B: we could have probably taken a bus or van all the way up here and avoided the whole gondola situation. The rain basically stopped as fast as it had started, and we ventured forth to explore the West Hills of Kunming.
We strolled along a road lined with vendor booths. We got to a point where we either had to hike up a bunch of stairs (hooray! more stairs!) or pay more money to get some kind of ticket. We opted for the stairs route and started climbing. We reached a little gazebo-type structure that functioned as a look-out. From there we could see a ridgeline up above 
with a summit and little ant-sized people walking along it. We made that our destination. After several more stairs we got to the main look-out area that had incredible views of the lake below and Kunming stretching out to the horizon.
We tried asking a man to take our picture. Some girls overheard us speaking English and started chatting with us. They translated for the man, who seemed to be an avid photographer. He said the light where we were standing was no good, we needed to climb out on the rocks to get a better photo. Of course, by the time we did all of this
maneuvering, the battery in my camera had finally died so we never actually got a photo.
At any rate, we asked the girls (after posing in a photo with them) what their plan was for getting back to the city. They said they were on a trip with their university, so they had vans they had come up in. They didn’t seem to know exactly how to get back to Kunming either. The photographer man came over to see what was going on and the girls explained our conundrum. He very generously offered to drive us back to town himself. He was with a bunch of other people, his wife, and maybe his brother or sister and their kids, and some grandmotherly figure. For lack of any better ideas about how to get back, we accepted.
We left the girls behind and neglected the actual summit. We followed this family back down the trail, taking a route we hadn’t taken on the way up . The man grabbed some berries off of a bush and handed them to us, seemingly expecting us to eat them. As avid wilderness explorers, Dan and I have been trained to never eat anything we find in the wild unless we are sure of its identification, but this guy starts popping them down his throat and then looks at us expectantly. We cautiously try a few. There weren’t bad, at least they didn’t taste like death, and he seemed satisfied so we were off the hook. Yet, I didn’t choose to try any more.
We hiked down to a road with some farms and houses on it. They had parked their cars at one of the houses, I’m not sure if it was a hotel, or if they knew the people who lived there or what. It ended up just being Dan and me and the man and his wife in the car. We felt bad, like they were going out of their way, so tried to communicate that they could just drop us off anywhere as long as we could find a cab. The traffic was really bad, so eventually they just sort of pulled over and signaled for us to get out. I was so turned around, I had no idea where we were, but at least we had the address of the hostel so we could just show that to a cab driver and hope for the best. We thanked the man and woman and climbed out.
We were in a part of town that sort of reminded me of the Hutong in Beijing, lots of small alleyways and little shops and schools and homes all jumbled together. We tried to discern where we were using the terribly unhelpful map in my guide-book but it was pretty useless. We had a hard time getting a cab but managed to snag one with some people getting out of it. He took us back to the hostel.
We tried to figure out how to get to the South Train Station Restaurant so we could eat a Chris’ favorite place in Kunming, but there was no information on the internet (in English at least) and the people at the hostel had never heard of it. We ended up going to the front desk at the hotel across the street, and a guy there was able to help us. He told us what bus to take and which stop to get off at. We made it there successfully, but it seemed like maybe they were closing down for the night and wouldn’t seat us. After all of the trouble we’d gone through to get there we were not about to turn around and go back. We stood around looking confused for long enough that finally someone gave us a table.
The place was huge and had French-like architecture, it was really pretty. We ordered some food and had a nice dinner. We managed to find our bus stop to take us back, stopping at a bakery to pick up some cookies for dessert along the way.
When we got back we decided now was the time to get our Chinese massage. We noticed that the lighting outside of the place next to our hostel could be construed as pink, but thought we’d take our chances. We pointed, using a sign, that we would like 2 massages. The man at the counter took us back down a long hallway. There was a door ajar revealing a group of girls lounging around wrapped cosily in blankets. Dan was on high alert. The man took us back to a room and shut the door, leaving us alone. Dan was clearly uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t say I was exactly relaxed. We decided to make a run for it, making excuses in English that I’m sure they didn’t understand. Oh well, no massage. We just had a drink at the hostel on their patio instead. Probably more relaxing anyway.
Amy's Adventures 