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We managed a couple of hours' sleep after our sunrise swim before Beth dragged us out out of ours beds and bullied us into town to try and organise our route onwards. First we needed to go back to Guilin to collect our big bags from our last hostel, then we would go on to Kunming. We had no idea how we were going to manage this, so a chaos of chasing each other through Yangshuo, panicking in tourist offices and corralling people towards the private bus we'd managed to book ensued. Somehow, we (by which I mean Beth and Cat) had organised both a bus to take us to the hostel in Guilin for our bags and another to take us from there to Kunming. We had a merciful few hours interim at the hostel to order food and get ourselves sorted, before what turned out to be the most uncomfortable journey of my life so far. A 9-person minivan had been sent to our hostel to collect the 10 of us (we said goodbye to Kaye in Guilin), but we also had to fit in all of our bags, some of which, like mine, are enormous. We squeezed Nold and most of the bags into the boot of the van; Naomi, Bertie, Henry and Alex packed into the back four seats with a couple of smaller bags; Beth and her rucksack lucked out with the front seat next to the driver; Hannah, Pete, Cat and I crammed into the remaining three seats in the middle of the bus with all of the bags that couldn't be fitted in elsewhere. The driver had anticipated that these three seats might not accommodate the four of us and so had thoughtfully provided the tiniest wooden stool you've ever seen for the last person into the bus to perch on. The last person into the bus was me. The door rammed into me and wouldn't close when I was sat down normally on the stool, so I had to stand and lean into the bus whllst the driver shut the door and then wedge myself back down into a sitting position afterwards. The stool was cutting into my bum, I had to cling to the door handle to keep myself upright and there physically wasn't enough room for me to move; the others asked me to wind down the window at one point and it took a full minute's struggling before I could untangle my arm enough even to find the right handle. Nobody was much better off, although Nold somehow managed to fall asleep crouching in the foetal position across one of the bags in the back. Hannah's attempt to open the car window to save us all from death by boiling went badly when she caught the wrong handle and swung the whole door open as we were careering down a main road. It was just a terrible, terrible 45 minutes.
The conclusion of this dire minivan journey was the 10 of us being emptied out into the rain in the middle of a highway, where we waited for a few minutes before our Kunming bus arrived. We would be on this bus for 18 hours, but thankfully it was a sleeper bus. These are too small to be properly comfortable, but it's easy enough to sleep if you're tired - which we were. I did nothing for those 18 hours but sleep, doze and listen to my iPod, and then we were in Kunming.
Alex had been to Kunming before, so he led the way to our hostel, The Hump, where Rob and Dan were waiting for us with stories of a wild night out the day before. None of us were feeling up to exploring that afternoon, so we confined ourselves to eating and napping, largely in preparation for the clubbing we had planned for that night. This was non-negotiable, as it was our last night with Beth and our only with Dan before the two of them flew to Xinjiang, to earn buckets of money teaching in a summer camp for two weeks with Nicole and a couple of other PT volunteers. We marked the occasion with a big banquet meal together in a small restaurant not far from the hostel. Naomi and the boys had prepared a list of awards to dole out to each other over the meal, in order to commemorate the year so far, for example "most bro-mantic partnership", "best bum", "worst drinker"... This was good fun, but the reactions of an American guy called Carter, who we'd invited along having met him previously in Yangshuo, to the stories we told whilst debating the winners of each award did suggest that some of these were worse than we'd previously thought. After dinner, and an hour or so getting ready and relaxing at The Hump, Rob and Dan led the way to the clubs where they'd spent the previous night. We spent the majority of the night in the biggest club, Muse, collecting a wide and random circle of new friends. The night ended in a smaller bar with good live music, where Dan whipped out two marker pens and we ended up drawing smiley faces on the chests of an assortment of new acquaintances.
Beth and Dan left early the next morning, leaving the rest of us to an easy day of strolling about the city exploring various markets. We didn't bother with Kunming's most famous tourist sites, the Stone Forest and the Dwarf Empire, because the Stone Forest would have been too expensive and we had some moral qualms about visiting the Dwarf Empire, where the residents live in concrete toadstools and dance for tourists. Instead, me and the boys went to see the pet market in the centre of town, which sold a crazy variety of animals from giant prehistoric-looking millipedes and scorpions through rabbits, chinchillas and black squirrels to dozens of types of birds. Past the main market there was also a street full of people selling dogs and puppies. The city centre of Kunming was really nice - clean and bright and with less ugly buildings than you can usually expect in Chinese cities. It did, however, have more child beggars than I've seen anywhere else I've been. There were children of between 6-12 stationed on every street and in every square we passed, singing at karaoke machines with hats at their feet, which I've never seen before in China. The youngest of these children had adults waiting not far from where they were singing, but I think the older ones were alone.
We had dinner at a cheap restaurant by the hostel, the girls bought bracelets and earrings at a small nearby jewellery market and in the evening we piled into taxis to the station for our 10-hour ovenight train to Lijiang. Spoiler: this journey wasn't fun either.
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Jo Looking at the map you are covering huge distances and now heading properly west to mountains. Looks exciting ... Xxxx