Thankfully the pilots didn’t graduate from the same school as the taxi drivers and we made it safely to Kunming. Unfortunately, our hotel had no internet, so there was no chance to update anything, despite having an unusually early night. Oh well, we’re out of Kunming now and in Dali, having picked up our Intrepid tour guide (and one other fellow traveller).
For our last day in Kunming we headed out to the tourist trap that is the Stone Forest. It was a titanic effort getting there, and our Lonely Planet guide was about as useful as a bag of dicks. Which is to say, not very useful at all. We ended up at the wrong bus station trying to catch the wrong bus and wasting about an hour and a half before we finally gave in and took a private minibus.
The 2-hour journey gave us plenty of time to appreciate the Chinese motorway system. Or should that be ‘system’. Several times the motorway ended in a dead end and our driver had to u-turn and go the other way. Heading under an overpass, the support posts were actually in the middle of the road (handily painted warning yellow, though) with cars weaving around them. More than once there were cars travelling the wrong way on the shoulder. And to top it all off, the air-conditioning on the bus was broken, but a handy thermometer was showing how hot it was inside (it started around 25 and topped out at around 34).
But, you gotta go with the flow. There is no point getting mad at these things because they are not going to change. You just have to laugh and make a mental note to write it all on your blog later!
