Kunming, CHINA - 27 april 2002
‘Welcome you to Kunming’ [sic] (or similar) is such a sign one sees all over Kunming as soon as you are out of the airport. However, on the day of my arrival, I was not so easily charmed.
For one, I arrived but my backpack did not! All my years of travelling, I had never had this stroke of bad luck. I anticipated being separated from my backpack at some point in my trip but I certainly did not expect it to be on the FIRST day of my RTW on the FIRST flight out of Singapore. It just spoiled my mood thoroughly.
For another, it did not help that all the services I received were done grudgingly and unsmilingly. I settled myself in Cha Hua Bing Guan and my requests to take note of any phone calls from Thai Airways were met with barely audible grunts.
I called the Thai Airways office to check how much allowance I would be given. My attempt to speak Mandarin must had been laughable for the lady switched to English for my benefit after a while. I was not tuned to the Mandarin mode yet - give me another day or two.
Then, I went shopping. No no, this is NOT the Singaporean spirit in me unleashed once out of the country but a girl had to brush her teeth and change her undies, hadn’t she?
Kunming seems quite a hectic city. The traffic is busy all the time. Vehicles are everywhere and unique to China, I supposed, is the enormous number of bicycles. The cyclists have utterly no regard for vehicles, much less for humans. I took cues from the locals when figuring out when to dash across the roads.
Any person, in any age group, in any attire, cycles. I know I would never be able to pass off as a local here (even if I did not open my mouth). I could never ride a bicycle in high-heels, dressed in working suit and mini-skirt and wearing a chiffon-ribboned chichi hat. Yes, you are right… I would never be caught dead in THAT chiffon-ribboned hat.
Besides bicycles, one had to watch out for SPITS from passing cyclists and pedestrians. There was always a throat being hawked somewhere. Depending on the situation, you either pause in your steps, foot in the air or you make haste to steer clear of the projectiles. Even well-dressed ladies and 3-year-old toddlers were capable of commanding healthy spits. Hooiaaaaarrrrhhh-ptyui!
Kunming, CHINA - 28 april 2002
It turned out that Dali, my next destination, had some sort of festival going on and for the Chinese, Labour Day (1 May) holiday is actually a week-long event. All these would translate to a huge number of tourists visiting Dali these few days, I reckoned.
Since I was confident of getting my backpack soon, I bought a bus-ticket for the day after tomorrow – 30 April 2002.
Kunming is a large, modern city but not very interesting. Still, it is clean and the air does not feel very polluted. As long as I did not get my backpack back, I did not want to head out of town for sight-seeing. I would rather be ‘on-call’ so that I could dash off to the airport once it was confirmed that my backpack had arrived.
So, I spent the day meandering all over the city again, checking out what remained of the Muslim district.
Back at the hostel, I made several calls to check on the status of my backpack. A guy had said it was on the 5pm flight but, by 6:30pm, I was told it was not. Perhaps, the 10pm flight later…
Standing in the lobby, I was sometimes, in-between calls, roped in to do translation work between the room attendant and the tourists. I knew this, er… ‘bilingual’ quality of mine would come in useful in China at some point. At times, when the room attendant was away, being the only Chinese there, I was mistaken for the room attendant.
“The… LIGHTS… in… my… room… NOT… working.” A tourist mimed an action for each word painfully and looked at me hopefully. “R-i-g-h-t… very sorry to hear that.” I grinned and sauntered away.
Later, when my room-mate Alex, from Austria, went to the travel agency to check on buying a bus ticket to Dali, I had to help translate again as the lady there was totally stupefied by his questions. Two tourists walked in and inquired about train tickets to Chengdu and the lady at once hunted me down to translate. Hmmm… How did she conduct her business at other times then? The conversation ended with me explaining that there would be Y30 commission each for the train tickets. Well, I think the whole translation effort should earn me Y10 each!
Kunming, CHINA - 29 april 2002
I spent yet another fruitless day wandering around Kunming. More bad news awaited me as my backpack was not on last night’s 10pm flight either. I was now to wait for the 2pm flight and told to check at around 4pm.
Argh… this was getting frustrating. I decided that I needed more things to survive a few more days. The next most important item: toilet paper. Once I had bought a roll, I felt safe enough to eat at the road-side stalls on the little stools amongst the locals. Soon, I found myself sitting hunched at a round table with other labourer-sorts, with a multi-chipped bowl of rice on hand and some veggies and slurping up the really good food.
4pm… again, no backpack. Sigh… As I was leaving for Dali tomorrow, the lady from the Claims Department told me to head down to the office to collect my Y300 [Y100 = US$12] compensation. If indeed my backpack was lost (which she assured me ‘does happen sometimes’), I would be paid US$20 per kg, minus the Y300 compensation, but only one month later. Argh, really crappy this trip was turning out.
At her office, she took my passport and other documents to make photocopies. Later, she told me she and I shared the same birth-date, including the year. Gosh… this was a strange coincidence as I had never met another person who shared the same birth-date as I. I had to take this as a good omen, for whatever it was worth.
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