An Overnight Bus From Kunming to Dali (Yunnan Province China)

An Overnight Bus From Kunming to Dali (Yunnan Province China)

We left Beijing mid-afternoon and flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province. The plan was to find a way to Lijiang (about a 10 hour bus ride away) and make our way to Tiger Leaping Gorge and do some hiking but outside of that 10 days of traveling with no plans and no direction. We had done some research on ways to get to Lijiang and read that there are buses overnight night sleeper buses from Kunming to Lijiang as well as buses that go about ¾ of the way to Dali. After a taxi ride from one side of Kunming to the bus station we pull off the interstate and start winding our way through some narrow streets with small children running around on the sidewalks with the adult’s playing cards outside of small shops. Next thing I know our cab stops and I move my attention from the window to the road in front of me and I see why we’re stopped, sitting in the middle of the road is a push cart that is six inches off the ground with a piece of ply wood forming a platform for a “stoplight,” it’s like this that I’m reminded that while China may be at the forefront of development and progress it is still a developing country.
In the bus station we learn that the bus we wanted to get on to Lijiang was sold out and we wouldn’t be able to get a bus until the morning to Lijiang, there was a sleeper bus that would be leaving shortly heading to Dali and we’d be able to get a bus from there to Lijiang. I’ve heard about sleeper buses from some of my friends that have spent a good deal of time traveling around China but none of them really told me what to truly expect other than bad smells, filth and discomfort.
The bus looked normal enough from the outside so I made my way towards the door with my backpack not wanting to put it under the bus because of the ever present threat of theft, as I tried to make my way up the stairs I stopped as I realized there wasn’t even going to be enough room for me let alone my 70 pound backpack. I toss my bag under the bus and make my way to my new home for the next 7 hours, the sleeper bus had “bunk beds” on the left side of the bus there were single bunks with an aisle that separated the bed on the left side from the bed on the right that slept three across with metal bars separating the people in the “beds.” The beds were assigned and I was lucky enough to get the bunk that was right next to the aisle, with Dirk between Cooper and me. As part of our luxury transportation we were provided with pillows and blankets were older than most of the people on the bus and smelled like urine. The bed itself was easily the most uncomfortable place I’ve ever laid down, it was clearly built for narrow shouldered people who are shorter than 6 feet tall. Dirk was reading the Lonely Planet guide book about Kunming and Dali and read the warning “Be weary of your luggage if you take an overnight bus from Kunming to Dali it is common for you to find it with a slit through it and your valuables missing,” and I just had to put my bag under the bus great!
As Dirk and I fought over who’s shoulder could dig into the metal bar between us the bus driver would take turns that would make me thankful those metal bars were there otherwise I’d have a 4 foot fall to the floor. Sleep was needless to say hard to come by as I’d find a comfortable enough position to fall asleep in for about 20 minutes until I’d wake up with a pain somewhere in my body.
Throughout the course of the ride to Dali we’d stop at random times because people would have to use the bathroom. Because there was no bathroom on the bus when people had to go the bus driver would stop on the side of the road and the needy person would have to find the closet tree to do their business. While we were stopped I realized that the smell of urine might be more than just a smell but come from necessity on a long overnight trip without a bathroom, with that comfortable thought it was time to try to get more sleep.

Shortly after 2 AM, I awoke to see us driving down a dark alley very slowly. I was really confused as to what was happening because we weren’t supposed to get into Dali for another 2 hours. Apparently the violent tossing in my bunk I felt all night was our drivers attempt to set a new speed record for our bus trip to Dali and we had arrived 2 hours early. Some of the other passengers got off the bus so I decided it’d be a good idea to check on my bag, stretch my legs, and see if I could find a bathroom. Bag was fine, had a good stretch, and I managed to find a drain grate that had to work as my bathroom. With some of our bus mates departing I managed to find a solo bunk on the bottom level that provided me with a little more comfort. I doze in and out for about two hours when suddenly I feel my foot get grabbed I open my eyes to a man frantically yelling at me in Chinese. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what he was saying but I kept hearing Lijiang, I look at my watch and see that it is about 5:45. I looked around trying to find Ted so he can figure out what was happening and as I find him I hear Ted say “there is a bus leaving right now for Lijiang if we hurry we can make it.”
We all jump off the bus grab our backpacks and make our way to “the bus.” The bus is a glorified Ford van that has 16 adult pass angers, a driver, two babies and a ton of luggage. I’m crammed between the wall (there was a window but since I was sitting on the wheel well I couldn’t see out the window) and Ted, with my knees buried in my chest. I look over to Ted and ask him how long the trip to Lijiang is from Dali, he looks at me and smiles “four hours get comfy.”
I managed to pass out for about an hour sitting propped between Ted and the wall while occasionally catching my head from falling off my shoulders (it reminded me of knob year physics class). Even with the sleep it was a long four hours, I couldn’t look out any windows and the lack of shocks on the van meant reading was impossible. So I sat there and did nothing, I’d close my eyes and try to get some sleep but the constant jarring proved to be too much.


A couple pictures one is a map that will show the area in Yunnan I was traveling. The other is a picture that was taken on the overnight bus of Dirk, Cooper and me.

Chinese New Year (Spring Festival)

Chinese New Year (The Spring Festival)

February 14th was the start of the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival. It is a two week long celebration of the new lunar year where family’s come together from all over the country to celebrate with each other and wish each other wealth, and longevity in the New Year. The holiday is a very family oriented one unlike our new year where people celebrate with friends CNY is celebrated at home with the family. I spoke with my professors to ask them what the traditional New Year is like in their homes. From what I could gather from the Chinglish conversations I had was that the families will gather together and watch CNY television programs (probably not Dick Clarke’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve but the same idea) and eat a dinner together that will last late into the night. Generally families will eat a fish course followed by dumplings around midnight (which are supposed to bring wealth in the New Year) and then a dessert of cake before bed. As most of this is done at home there isn’t much for a foreigner to participate in or to witness. The biggest aspect of CNY that a foreigner gets to witness is the attempt to blow up the city with fireworks and last year they were more successful than this year as the CCTV headquarters was burned to the ground as a result of the excessive amount of fireworks (this building was about 2 miles due south of my apartment (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/09/cctv-building-on-fire-ico_n_165186.html). This year the fireworks were still shot off in full force but without the destruction.
I can say that I have never seen and will probably never see the skies light up like that ever again. Having witnessed on the news the live shots from war torn countries, Beijing on and around CNY could easily be confused with a combat zone. Starting most days during the two weeks of Spring Festival the sounds started and continued on well past midnight on most nights. People would be in the streets, on the sidewalks, behind apartment buildings and everywhere they could find a few feet to blow something up. On our way to Drum and Bell (a roof top bar that sits right between the Drum and Bell Towers with a great view around the city) on CNY our cab suddenly stopped I looked up to see the road in front of us exploding fireworks were being shot off in every direction imaginable from the center of the road. This wasn’t on a side street either this was in the middle of a 6 lane road that acts as a central artery running east and west through the city. For over 5 minutes the road continued to explode and then it stopped suddenly and we began to move as we drove by you could see in the road trash everywhere, red paper and cardboard littering the road and sidewalks where the fireworks had been. Once we arrived at the Drum and Bell I made my way upstairs where for a couple hours I watched a seemingly endless amount of fireworks be shot off throughout the city. I have uploaded a video to youtube that shows what this is like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSOPGNNyS3c .

Language First Impressions

So I need to tell everyone that I'm sorry I have posted in about a month. We finished classes in early Feb. and had the month off and I did a bunch of traveling around south China. I've got some good stuff coming in the next week or two to write about from the Chinese New Year celebrations to my trip. Anyway, here is a few thoughts on the language so far:

So I figure this will be an interesting post for me to look back on in a year and see how my education changes my views on what I have politely dubbed the most confusing language in the world. I came into my language study in China knowing very little about the language other than the complexity of it and that it is a tonal language. The first day of class we were handed 4 text books designed to teach us over our short term study (we are here for one short term study and two full semesters) the basics of the language.

There are 5 tones in the Chinese language they are numbered first, second, third, fourth and neutral tones. First tone is a higher pitched drawn out sound that is probably the most unnatural sound that has ever come out of my mouth. Second tone starts at a normal level and you raise the tone of your voice almost in the way people will raise their tone when asking a question. Third tone is a drop and rise tone where you lower your tone then raise it back up as confusing as it may sounds its probably the easiest one to say on a regular basis. Fourth tone is a falling tone where you almost cut the end of the sound off. The neutral tone would be the one that would be most similar to every day speaking for us where you aren’t having any inflection in your voice.
The written Pinyin form of Chinese is a westernized form of writing using traditional letters with tone marks. Pinyin is only used to help with pronunciation and cannot be used in writing because the words have a multitude of meanings. For example the word in pinyin “shi” can be pronounced in each of the four tones but can also be represented by a number of different characters (是，时，etc) it also has numerous meanings which in spoken Chinese must be inferred from the context of the conversation (shi can mean among other things: be, are, right, yes, thing, accident, trouble, responsible, job, problem, hour, time fashion, opportunity, truth, solid, ten, etc. etc. etc.). The characters are suppose to represent things in the form of “pictures” for example 人is ren which means people so that wishbone is a picture of a person don’t ask me how that looks like a person because I don’t seen it but somehow they do and my opinion doesn’t matter.
Our classes have been taught by three different professors. Unfortunately, on the first day of class they came in and told us there names in Chinese while speaking nothing but Chinese so we don’t know their names, therefore we’ve given them all nicknames. We had Kermit, Old Lady, and Hot for Teacher. The process of these names was as simple as you could think, Kermit I thought looked like Kermit the frog and she wore a lot of green, Old Lady was the oldest of the group and Hot for Teacher was the best looking of the group (and Ted had a little crush on her). Learning Chinese though with no base is hard enough and these woman did everything they could to make it as easy as possible on us however their inability to speak English made learning very challenging and frustrating. Old lady was the worst, she came from the old school Chinese way of thinking where they don’t want to correct you because it may embarrass you so even when we’d be doing something wrong she’d give us a “Hen Hao” (very good) and when we’d ask if we were using a word correctly we’d get a “Dui” (Correct) even if we weren’t. And so for six weeks we went to class everyday and have been working to learn some of this crazy language, between the Hanzi (characters) , the Pinyin, and the spoken I’ve got a long way to go but hopefully in a year from now I’ll have an idea as to what I’m doing.

Picture with the guys and our teachers. Kermit and Old Lady are in the picture together and Hot For Teacher is by herself with us.