Kunming

Laos to China is a big step, a different world! It’s like a Sunday morning pub football team suddenly playing in the Premiership! The bigget city in Laos would go unnoticed placed in the middle of an average town in China. Bumpy and uncomfortable roads are over and we are speeding along a highway towards Jinghong, You forget how big this place is, the ground you need to cover to get anywhere. We spend the night at a strange but comfortable college hostel and eat at a fantastic street restaurant before getting a night bus to Kunming the following day. 6 months or so ago we had flown out of Kunming to Nepal but never saw the city, so at a bus station around 30km from the centre of town this really is where we left off last time and makes perfect sense to start here now. There are no tuk-tuks on offer here so we resort to getting in a cab as we have no idea how or what bus will get us anywhere near our hostel, not that cabs are expensive, 50p for a 45 minute journey into town, but feels like we are being exuberant! We dump bags and head straight into town, dodging people – so many people! Staring at the shops – big, shiny, new shops! Look to the sky – huge fancy glass sky scrapers disappear into the smog! It’s 9:30 and the streets are busy but most things are still shut, guessing it’s a night kinda town. We head down to a city lake and out to the student area looking for a bookshop, afterwards checking out a temple which was mid-restoration. Think China has realised although nothing should stop or get in the way of progress they need to keep a few reminders of their history! We had an afternoon of planning to figure out our exact way through China, which resulted in us changing our plans slightly… we decided to skip Guilin and Yangshou having visited them 4 years ago, and although beautiful it was untouched then and now it sounds very different. Instead we would visit a mountainous area south of Kunming before heading East. Aside of planning we seemed to spend a lot of time in a hostel that wasn’t the one we were staying in because they had free wifi, just wandering the city streets or sadly getting excited because there were supermarkets to explore – after relying on small stores containing stale crisps and biscuits for a few weeks the excitement caused by seeing a supermarket with pick-a-mix veg, noodles and tofu on offer was almost too much! Grab a bag and go for your life filling it up until your heart and belly is content.