Another very relaxing wake up and a saunter down to the post office to send my soon to be redundant China guidebook and mountain scarfs, and the assortment of dried leaves that I bought yesterday. Tonight my sleeper bus leaves at 7.30 and heads off south down to the border town of Hekou and from there it's a walk across the river and I shall be in Vietnam. I end buying some more Pu'er before I leave China so I can have some while I am wondering around the jungles, beaches and bustling cities of China's neighbour. It's quite sad to think that I will be leaving the country I have spent so long in and experienced so much in. I have been here since the 10th of August and have raked up 63 days travelling over a fantastic country, meeting some great people and learning about a fascinating culture, history and language. The next stop Vietnam, will, hopefully be equally as good, but I am not going to enjoy going back to a zero communication level as it makes everything so so hard.
I get on my bus at 7.00pm and we leave on time 30mins later. It's old, quite small and smells as if it has done many journeys to the humid and sweaty south China-Vietnam border, mmmmm. At about 1.30am the bus stops and I wake from my slumber partly and have a look around, but don't really take any notice and fall back asleep. when I really wake up at about 7am, we are still in the same place and the bus doors are open and there is a lot of traffic backed up around us. Out of the bus and down the road I find out that there has been an accident and an artic has literally taken out a small minibus, the debris of the crash spread out along the road a good 50m or so. I can't see any sign of the passengers as they would have been long gone, but outside the mini bus sits one lone trainer. We start moving at about 8am and arrive in Hekou at lunch time the next day.
Beautiful lie in until 10am and slowly meandering out of bed and into the shower, all in all I'm out of the hostel at a very unrespectable midday for what will be my last full day in China, but I feel refreshed. I have nothing to do today really, apart from do a bit of planning for my onward travels, and I have decided to head straight to Hanoi and have some Vietnamese fun. I head over to the University district with it's many swish and fancy cafes, shops, restaurants and a shop that stocks English language books. 5 mins of quick browsing and I pick up a guidebook for Vietnam for 240Y, to put this into perspective I am currently paying 35Y per night in accommodation, can get a large meal for less than 10Y and a 500ml bottle of beer costs about 3-5Y. I guess they just know their market and that tourists will pay for the privilege to know about something before they get there.
After my big spending I head over to a tea shop and buy some Pu'er tea, famously made in Yunnan and what I sampled a few days before in Lijiang. I get to sit down and sample some of the teas and over the course of an hour or so I buy two Pu'ers, a green tea, and a Ku(bitter) tea, I'm quite sure I've not been duped as the teas are lovely, well worth the buy and I have enough to last for ages. Internet cafe in to the evening to see if I can finally get this blog up to date.
We all get up apart from Ilya who is stay another day and head off to Tiger Leaping Gorge tomorrow, to catch our morning transport in very different directions. Michel is going to the airport to fly north east and to Chengdu, Chen is going north west(ish) to Shangri-la and I'm heading off south east to Kunming. It's another goodbye to some great people and again it's sad to say goodbye to people you meet along the way. You can form good friendships considering you eat, travel, sleep and explore all with the same people and spend more or less all of your time with them. The journey to Kunming is an average 9 hours or so and over the course of the 500km the weather gets hotter and hotter and I am no longer in the relative cool of China's highlands. The city is relatively small for China's standards and seems quite relaxed and green, with it's tree lined roads and laid back atmosphere.
A bit of shopping and I buy some new headphones as my Heathrow £40 duty free pair have broke down, Gutted! Also to the global firm that is the giant Walmart plonked in the middle of Kunming. It's heaven as I love strolling around the Chinese super markets at home and this is like one massive house party, if I was back home I would come out with trolley loads of weird and wonderful things.
Today Chen invites us to go with him to a small town called Suho which is right near Lijiang and shares it's old world charms, but in a more rural setting. Ilya needs to go and change some money first, so he sets off to get it done and in the mean time we potter about the hostel and grab showers, wash clothes etc. An hour passes, and then another one and we think that we must have lost our Russian companion. We decide to go and grab some brunch and Chen takes us to a Lijiang hot pot restaurant which is delicious and with an interesting decor, pig carcasses being dried on racks by fans along one of the walls. Chen insists on paying for lunch, the taxi fare to the restaurant and the bus fare out to Suho, he won't accept our money and wants to treat me and Michel to everything. We call the hostel and ask for Ilya but 4 hours later and there is still no sign of him.
Suho is lovely and so laid back, we hit a cafe and drink espressos with cheesecake and tiramisu, Manu Chao playing on the stereo system in the background, incense swirling up next to the window and big deep sofas to recline into. This really doesn't feel like China and it seems like I am in a seriously relaxed coffee bar in Camden somewhere. When we eventually pull ourselves back to the hostel in the late afternoon, there is still no sign of Ilya, he must be seriously lost and without a mobile phone there is no way to contact him. Chen makes us some tea in the traditional and old fashioned way, it's delicious. We also have Pu'er tea, which is a traditionally made, old fashioned tea and is lovely, it also stimulates your appetite and I am starving after a few cups. Ilya eventually makes it back and tells us that he got lost several times, eventually made it to a bank in the afternoon and then spent over two hours searching for the hostel. Epic. We all head out and Ilya takes us to a place he found where we drink Chinese moonshine, two small glasses equate to about 4 UK shots and it definitely packs a punch.
ling cities of China's neighbour. It's quite sad to think that I will be leaving the country I have spent so long in and experienced so much in. I have been here since the 10th of August and have raked up 63 days travelling over a fantastic country, meeting some great people and learning about a fascinating culture, history and language. The next stop Vietnam, will, hopefully be equally as good, but I am not going to enjoy going back to a zero communication level as it makes everything so so hard.
at 7.00pm and we leave on time 30mins later. It's old, quite small and smells as if it has done many journeys to the humid and sweaty south China-Vietnam border, mmmmm. 
At about 1.30am the bus stops and I wake from my slumber partly and have a look around, but don't really take any notice and fall back asleep. when I really wake up at about 7am, we are still in the same place and the bus doors are open and there is a lot of traffic backed up around us. Out of the bus and down the road I find out that there has been an accident and an artic has literally taken out a small minibus, the debris of the crash s
pread out along the road a good 50m or so. I can't see any sign of the passengers as they would have been long gone, but outside the mini bus sits one lone trainer. We start moving at about 8am and arrive in Hekou at lunch time the next day.
