Back at Cloudland, or, Resolution (no pictures, and short)

Our last morning in Dali was a short, simple and sweet one.
I think we actually got breakfast AND lunch, just because I didn’t know when the next chance I’d have to get such an awesome burger would be. We had a few hours while waiting to be taken to the next long-distance bus back to Kunming. I think we went back into Old Town so a few people could take a look at some shops just in case, and to kill time. We also spent time in a bookstore/café, and didn’t buy a single thing there, though we looked through all of their books and finally at their magazines. I think Ariel took a few of their magazines, which were about Yunnan, and which she later used to decorate her apartment a little bit.

We mozied around, and I took in my last few breaths about the place that I longed to reach from within the depths of that book, but which I never did really see. I certainly didn’t have time to go rock climbing either, so that eluded me as well. Sunday had been awesome though, so I hardly cared at that moment.

Finally it came time for us to go, and we were first carried into two taxis that took us to another place to put us in a minivan, to take us to the long distance bus station. It was absurd. We were also really short on time, thanks for once to them and not to my group, and I questioned whether the minivans would get us there in time. When the taxis got us to the minivans, there was only one minivan, and it could sit all but one of us. I yelled and argued at them that it was idiotic they didn’t just let the last person squeeze in, no cop would pull us over on account of thinking there were too many people. I let them know how highly I thought of them (not very) and called them amateurs and all the lot. They wouldn’t relent, though. Soon enough the second minivan arrived, and I made sure a few people get into it, grumbling, and we were off.

We got to that long distance bus, in the end, with no particular problems, and we got on and tried to mentally prepare for yet another 6 hour ride.

By now most people were experts at this. Most of us had brought some study materials along with us for the trip, though I never touched mine. Others did, as they had on the original 44 hour train ride. Other people had an ability to sleep I could only dream of. This leg of the trip was no exception, and I found myself trying to be as vacant as possible, interspersed with some conversation with Christine.

This post is going to end up being pretty short. We didn’t really have time to do much this day.

When we arrived back in Kunming, and finally got to our hostel, once again Kunming Cloudland, it was already probably about 7pm or so. We put our stuff down, and resolved to go have a nice dinner.

We went back to the first part of Kunming we ever really enjoyed, where the street food was. I think we just hung out for a while, and ultimately we wound up in one particular place for dinner, a standard looking Chinese family-style restaurant, and ordered a bevy of plates to eat. It was all standard fare, and we did what we could with it.

I think Jing wasn’t feeling well afterwards, sick to her stomach for some reason. She didn’t have much of an appetite either. I worried a bit about her, but there was little that could be done at the time. She was going to be under my watch for the next 24 hours anyway, so I just tried not to worry too much. I think at the time she said she was just too excited or something like that.

That was pretty much it for the “group”. Afterwards, we went pretty much straight back to the hostel, so that Lauren, Sarah, Jill, and Ariel could try to get an early night’s sleep and wake up in the morning with no particular trouble, as they had a flight early on to go back to Shanghai so they could make it back in time for a Monday evening class, whereas David, Christine and I had a 7pm flight, and Jing was taking a train midday Monday.

Just because the girls were getting an early night, though, didn’t mean the four of us remaining would also. So Christine, David, Jing and I set out for the area we had just come from, basically, which was also really the bar area. I had somehow previously seen some soft serve ice cream stand there, which, incidentally, had the same pictures as a soft serve place I had only ever seen in Korea, so I had hoped the ice cream would be the same. This was one of our destinations for the night, and I hyped it up like crazy to Christine, who, as you may remember, was my ice cream buddy.

Well, it WASN’T the same ice cream. !#$$^Y&. Oh well. It was still okay, though horribly overpriced. I think at this point I also got some food, some dumplings or something, as I was still pretty hungry.

We went on the crawl looking for halfway decent bars or something to hang out in, and I think we even went in one, but they were all the standard bar/club that’s about nightlife, and not about relaxing, so there really wasn’t anything for us there.

As we were just meandering, we saw some guy get thrown out of some establishment, and man was that guy fucked up. His face had been rearranged, and blood dripped down by the bucket. We sat around and watched for a while, keeping a clear berth, to try to understand what was going on. This was resolved fairly quickly by the arrival of the men in blue, and I pulled the others along to move along. Aside from this guy, we had also seen a variety of people puking their guts out way too early in the evening. Lightweights.

Just a short jaunt down the road, we walked past a sex toy store, and I got the great idea to try and totally mortify Jing, figuring she had never seen this sort of thing before. So I dragged her in, and she saw what there was to saw. Its collection of merchandise wasn’t quite as impressive as the only ever sex toy store I had ever been to in China, one back home in Shanghai and incidentally the same company, but it was still sufficient. Sadly, Jing wasn’t quite as horrified as I was hoping for. I mean, she still was a little perturbed, but somehow we had already destroyed enough of her innocence that it didn’t really matter all that much.

So we rolled right back out and randomly wandered some more. At some point, we decided we wanted to get to a convenience store, which ended up being easier said than done. We probably walked for miles, through just random city territory.

This was a good a time as any, so I ended up talking to Christine a lot, and telling her about a lot of the things that had been bothering me throughout the course of the trip, about the things that all kinds of people had been doing, about what I hadn’t been doing and what I had been doing, and about the things that just couldn’t work out, and so on. It had been mostly a mystery to her up to this point, which hadn’t been entirely fair on my part, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. So I let her know, and got it all off my chest without anything being held back, and it helped.

The four of us kept wandering for what was probably two hours, and was the biggest fail of an attempt to go out and see halfway decent nightlife that I’ve ever known. It was okay, though. The four of us were a good group of musketeers, and it was still totally fine. Somehow, we ultimately made our way back to the Hump Hostel, where I had met that random Australian guy who recommended we go to the Barley youth hostel in Shangri-la, and hung out in their bar for a while. We got a couple of drinks there, and discussed the trip in retrospective, talking about the best parts, the stand out parts, and the parts that had the biggest impact on us, insofar as we could determine at that moment.

It wasn’t a bad discussion, as such things go, but we were pretty tired. That Australian guy was there; I waved to him, but he was hanging out with some older lady, his age, and I didn’t want to mess that up for him.

When we left this place, we checked out a Chinese bar right next door, and it was utterly ridiculous, as they tend to be, so we left just a minute later, and then hailed a cab and went back to Kunming Cloudland. Jing and David got ready for bed, and retired for the night, but Christine and I stayed up to see the sun rise, and it was one of the best sunrises I had ever seen, thanks to the company, though still somewhat bittersweet.

Tomorrow, we’d be leaving.