Kunming

4/16/2013
This was probably the most impromptu trip I have ever taken. We decided to go on this trip because we got a great deal on airfare– it was about $260 round trip (and the other times we had looked into the flights it was more like $400+) which is one of the cheaper flights we have booked, and its definitely the farthest we have traveled. Since this deal pretty much came out of nowhere, Liz and I threw this trip together in about 2 days; Including booking plane tickets, hostels and trains to get us to every destination. I thought it was pretty impressive of us! Originally there were going to be 4 of us- a great travel size group. Liz John and I were to fly out of Shanghai at 1:30 and Nathan was going to follow us and fly out at 2:30 because by the time he tried to book our flight it was sold out. So we headed to the Pudong airporat around 11am and Nathan came with us in order to save costs on a tax and save him the hassle of getting to the airport by himself. Liz John and I checked in using the self check in machines but when Nathan tried to check in, it would not allow him. We thought that it might be because Spring airlines  only lets you check in about an hour or an hour and a half before your flight. We asked the girl standing next to the machines if this was the case and she said yes, so we did not worry about it. We all decided to grab a quick lunch before heading through security. We left Nathan to check in and told him to call one of us if for some reason there were any issues with him checking in. As we were boarding our flight Nathan called John and explained that his flight was actually out of Hongqiao airport, not Pudong, and so he was in a cab rushing to the airport to try to catch his flight. We thought that he had a pretty good chance of making it, but when we landed in Kunming we had a text message waiting for us from him saying otherwise. We encouraged him to take a different flight out the next morning and meet us in Lijiang, because he could still enjoy the trip, but he thought it would be too complicated and decided not to come. And then there were three…

As we were initiating our descent into Kunming, the flight attendants told us to raise our window shades in preparation for landing, and when I did I was surprised to see the landscape below us. It was beautiful mountainous terrain spanning as far as the eye could see, with red sand terraces winding down the mountains and farming areas in the gullies. It was scenery that I would expect to see while flying over somewhere in south America. It was beautiful.

We landed in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. The airport was surrounded by red dirt fields and farmland, and the landing strip was barely a landing strip more like a clay/dirt road. I felt like it was a small airport somewhere in Mexico or something for small prop planes, not large industrial jets. I wish I had my phone on so that I could have snappd a few pictures because I’m not describing it very well.

Once we got off the plane and entered the airport I was surprised by how developed it was. The modern airport felt so out of place in this little, seemingly undeveloped town. We had a few hours before we needed to catch our overnight train to Lijiang so we headed to the airport shuttle area and randomly chose a bus that looked like it took us to the Kunming city center. We paid 25 RMB for a ticket and luckily it took us right smack dab in the middle of the city! We had no plans for once we were in the city, so we looked at a map and saw that we were pretty close to a pedestrian street, so we headed towards that. On the way we stumbled across this park so we walked around that for a while. It was really pretty and serene. There was this little pagoda surrounded by palm trees that was pretty cool, and another pagoda in the center of the lake that had some lily pads floating in it, but we couldn’t get to the pagoda because the lake had overflown and was covering the path out to it. So we left the park and headed towards the pedestrian street to find food.

To our surprise the pedestrian street was awesome. It was packed with people and had a ton of nice stores and snack places. We passed a frozen yogurt place and got a little too excited over it and decided we had to come back after dinner. We ended up eating dinner at this Italian/Asian fusion type restaurant called Cabana- not sure why since there was no Spanish or Mexican influence to the place whatsoever. It was pretty good and really cheap. They had a wide variety of options for food which is nice. After killing around 2 hours at this place, we headed to get frozen yogurt and then catch a cab to the train station. We boarded the train around 10:20pm, left at 10:55 and pretty much went straight to bed. The train was not as comfortable as the one we took to Beijing but it was fine. We all slept pretty well I think.