Short stop - Kunming

A leisurely start to the day at 8.00am on Wednesday 30 November saw us packing for our trip to Kunming on an express bus. We were impressed to be collected from the MCA Hotel on schedule (9.30am) and transferred to another hotel where we found our bus already waiting.

We have to give it to the Chinese - they are very punctual. When they say that the bus will depart at a certain time - it does!! We had a short stopover in Xiagun before heading off on our 5 hour trip to Kunming along the recently opened 4-6 lane highway. Apparently this has only been opened in the last couple of months and has cut the journey time down considerably.

The bus was equipped by a very efficient hostess who handed out bottles of water for the trip and plastic bags. We chose to assume that these were for rubbish and used them accordingly. The road made its way through mountains and along valleys and included some pretty spectacular tunnels. The longest of these was 3+kms which had Keith rather stressed out cos he couldn't enjoy (make that videotape) the scenery.Dotted along the road and through the valleys were small villages, all the buildings made of mud brick or rammed earth. Being winter many of the fields were fallow, others had winter vegetable crops in. We were curious about the number of eucalyptus trees along the roadsides - are they indigenous or were they brought back by returning gold miners?

A lunch stop was had at the half way point. We gave the assorted snack foods a big miss and took out even more mandarins (well.... we are in China and mandarin is one of the languages!) and enjoyed our jasmine tea. Back on the bus after 30 mins (the allotted break time) we were amused to find out that we now had movies on the bus. They were no use to us cos they were in Chinese but must have been entertaining for everyone else.

The rest of the journey was pretty much more of the same from the morning, but included a few more tunnels. The road finished a bit short of Kunming and the final hour was spent in fairly impressive traffic getting through the suburbs of Kunming. We were greatly pleased that after our previous experience of bus travel, Keith had thought to mention where we wanted to go to our helpful hostess. She very kindly pointed the hotel out as we reached the final destination. It was a short stroll back to the Camellia Hotel and we dumped our bags before heading out for our only sightseeing in Kunming... a walk around the block!

This done, we enjoyed a rather cold beer before moving to another restaurant for dinner. We thought that fried potatoes would go nicely with our chicken curry and mixed vegetables. We were very disappointed to find out that they were only french fries (not really our favourite food!) We had another beer to cope with this disappointment.

A quiet night surfing the satellite TV channels trying to find Edwin Maher (former ABC weatherman who now reads the news on Central China TV). Alas, he wasn't around so we went to bed early in preparation for our trip to Guilin the next day.