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The bus from Dali to Kunming was meant to take four and a half hours. We set off around 9.30am, expecting to arrive by 3pm, so we'd have a safe amount of time before our train at 5.30pm and the boys' flight at 9pm but, as you might have guessed from the blog title, this didn't exactly pan out. Our driver was going slowly right from the start and factoring in several long and unnecessary stops, but at 2pm, already worryingly behind schedule, the bus came to a stop several trucks behind a line of traffic cones... and stayed there, for the next 12 hours. Yes, we were stuck at the front of a traffic jam, in the middle of nowhere, for 12 hours.
At first we just strolled about near the bus, trying to work out what was going on. Some people walked past the cones and on as far as they could, in search of whatever accident had caused the traffic jam, but they couldn't find anything. We were told by our driver and the police car stationed by the cones that it would take several hours for the road to be cleared and that we'd set off again at 10pm. Lies! There was no doubt that we'd miss both our train and flight though, so we had the panic of trying to cancel and get back the money we'd spent on these tickets to entertain ourselves. Then, we spent the rest of the afternoon wasting our time as best we could, sitting in the sun or wandering off in search of food and toilets. Pretty much every time we made it more than 10 minutes walk from the bus, whether to go to the toilets (the public toilets we found were the filthiest I've ever seen. The toilet pan was not just full, but heaped and overflowing. It was foul*.) or to eat dinner, there would be a false alarm regarding the bus setting off, we'd exchange panicked phone calls and we'd end up sprinting back to the bus... just to sit in stifling heat for 10 minutes before we realised that we weren't going to move after all, and climbed back off.
By the time night fell, keeping ourselves occupied had become more difficult and the boredom was starting to get to us. I was pacing and lunging, trying to tire myself out, and there was a scary moment when I thought someone had thrown pee at me and freaked out, demanding Cat sniff my leg to check (turns out it wasn't pee). Later, we played hide and seek amidst the stopped traffic, which is how we came to spend roughly an hour of our lives variously crouching in hedges by the roadside, between the wheels of several lorries and amidst lines of traffic cones - or, for Rob, just pretending to be one of a group of Chinese guys smoking together. By midnight though, we were just sat in the dark in a depressed circle, hating our lives. We'd lost a lot of money on cancelled tickets, it looked like the boys would miss their rescheduled flight too, putting all of their plans for the next three weeks in danger, and just being stuck by the roadside for 12 hours is miserable enough just by itself. It was really, really crap.
Eventually, at 2am, our bus did set off again, and we made it into Kunming just before 5am. That afternoon, Naomi had managed to arrange with the driver for his friends to pick us up and whisk us off to the airport as soon as we arrived, so from here things went quite smoothly. To save time, money and energy we no longer had, Cat, Hannah, Naomi and I had decided to bypass Chengdu on our route and fly straight to Xining, where Naomi lives. We bought tickets on a 7am flight, the same time as the boys', headed through security together (with only brief delays for Hannah's bag to be searched and Nold to be frisked) and said our goodbyes.
*I felt like this went without saying, but just in case - we didn't use this toilet!
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