February 18, 2008
Dali - Kunming: A Chinese CITY
How we cover the 350 kilometers from Dali to Kunming is a short story. We planned to leave Dali on Monday which turns out to be the first day that the sun isn't shining at all and it doesn't take long for us to realize that we aren't going to enjoy this grey ride, especially when it starts to drizzle. We find our way to the bus station and hop a bus to Kunming.
Well, it doesn't go quite that easily. Dali city, or Xiaguan, is quite spread out and we circle around in search of the bus station. When I ask, and I know how to say 'where is the bus station' in Chinese, I don't understand the directions (as usual). It is interesting that people will often write down the answer for me when I don't understand, thinking I will understand the Chinese characters better. And it is true for the Chinese that it is often easier to communicate with other Chinese speaking a different dialect using the written language they have in common. Alas, it doesn't work for me.
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However, I can read the characters for bus station and eventually I spy a sign with the characters for 'gong gong qi che zhan', and there are some buses outside to confirm my reading ability. There are several buses leaving for Kunming every hour. We get a bummer. We have hardly been on the expressway ten minutes when our bus gets slower and slower, every other bus is passing us, and we then come to a standstill. The driver fiddles around with the motor and we make another start only to cover another 50 meters before the motor dies again. We are curious how the driver will deal with the situation. We expect he will call the bus company to send a substitute. Naive western thinking. He spreads the parts of the motor out on the shoulder of the highway and proceeds to tinker and eventually after two and a half hours we are again travelling, this time at a nice clip to make up for lost time.
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As we enter Kunming, we see this is a real city with its endless rows of high rises on the periphery, overpasses and highways leading into town and traffic jams. So far we have been in two smaller towns. As the Germans say, we have picked the raisins out of the cake, or chosen the daintiest morsels. Jinghong and Dali aren't representative. As is often the case with smaller towns, tourism has changed the character of these places, in Dali more so than in Jinghong. Kunming is Kunming with or without tourists.
From the bus station we are fortunate to find a decent hotel within two-minutes walking distance. I wouldn't have been up to looking much further in the dark in a strange city and tired from the bus ride. After dumping our bags we go out for a meal and discover this to be quite a seedy part of town. Nevertheless, we get a hot bowl of soup and some jao zi, those little steamed meat-filled dumplings which are always good.
We were told Kunming was going to be warmer than Dali. Well, it isn't.
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