The End of Days

Sometime after Christine and I had slinked off to bed, maybe an hour later, Jill, Lauren, Sarah, and Ariel left to get going for their plane back to Shanghai. They never did pay for that room, the tightwads! (Just teasing)

So when the rest of us woke up, it was decidedly more mellow. There was only four of us to worry about anymore, which meant that at any given point in time we would still only need a maximum of one taxi. Soon enough, we wouldn’t even be four, as one of the first things we had to do was take Jing to the train station so she could start going back home to her town of Shenzhen (I say town, but it has something like 15 million people living there).

I think we had a final breakfast before the sendoff, but I couldn’t swear to it. We took her as far into the train station as we could, though, then exchanged humongous hugs, as who knew when we’d get the chance to meet again, you know?

It had been tremendous to finally see Jing in person. She was the first consistent pen pal I’ve ever had, and the two of us have known each other by now for a couple of years; she feels like one of my oldest friends, despite that, and having to part with her after having just barely gotten to be with her was pretty sad. I don’t really know how everyone else felt about it, of course they wouldn’t have the attachment I did, but I think they were mostly sad too.

We did have to say goodbye though, and soon, bubbly little Jing was bouncing through the doors of the train station, and I’d have to wait a day or two to hear from her at all, until I got myself a new phone.

With that, there were three, and there was little to do. Realistically, we had maybe 5-6 hours tops to see something in the city and get out.

There was one spot in particular I had in mind, a particular temple, known as the Bamboo Temple, which is home to a whole ton of bizarre wood sculptures that, when they were originally crafted, were controversial enough to get the guy who made them booted out of sculpture camp, but not controversial enough to be taken down, apparently.

So we had information from our hostel about how to get to the actual Temple, about what buses to take and such, and we didn’t waste any time in hopping onto those proper buses. It took us probably an hour to get there, but it was pretty simple to do so.

A small entrance fee out of the way, we made our way into the complex. At first, most of it was pretty standard. The further you went, though, the more was uncovered. There was a weird Rhino turtle hybrid statue. There were little squirrel handpegs on the stone rails. It was in fact pretty odd. The bottoms of barrels had dragons heads protruding upwards, and a curious stele with fat Buddha on it that appeared to have his happy trail depicted, though we couldn't quite come to an agreement about that. And the main event, the weird wooden sculptures, were in fact pretty weird. I flaunted the rules and took pictures of everything. Keep your eyes peeled (no pun intended) for the guy taking his skin off, or perhaps the guy surfing on a dolphin, and in general, look for anything else you can find.

 

After that, it was a bit more random exploring. David and Christine were underwhelmed by the lack of bamboo in a place called The Bamboo Temple. We found another Californian kid in the very back of the complex, incidentally a kid in the same program as Christine, named Johnny, and we hung out with him for a while.

It turned out he was on the same flight as the three of us, so we resolved to meet each other in a part of the Bird and Bee Market or whatever its called in central Kunming, not far from our hostels. First the three of us were going to go back to our hostels and grab our stuff, then book it back to the spot to meet Johnny.

This time, we had time on our side as a stalwart ally, and getting ready to leave Yunnan was a relatively simple task. Going back to our hostel, we picked our meager belongings up with little effort, then got a taxi again to go to that market.

It took us a while to finally meet up with the guy. He wasn’t the best at describing his location, the streets he was at, nothing tangibly useful. But whatever, we eventually found him. He wanted to make a trip to the oldest pharmacy in town to get a bit of their cure-all root or something.

On the way to finding him, by the way, there were your usual groups of hawkers, plus a few unusual ones, including old ladies with a menu of assault rifles and crossbows we could choose from. That kind of made my day.

From there, we got in a taxi, and headed to the airport. That was really it.

At the airport, we did all the standard airport-y things, and got a few snacks and got ready to go, sitting in our chairs for probably half an hour or so before we could board. We talked some more about what had gone on in our trips, and what we were looking forward to back at home.

Just like that, this crazy wild trip was over. It pretty much started with a bang and ended with a sputter, but that’s just how things go sometimes. Soon enough, we were on board a plane, and David and Johnny were doing their best to cope as Christine and I did our best to ignore the people around us. Easily the best plane ride of my life.

In a few hours, we’d be back in Shanghai. David would have to take a taxi all by himself back to his place, whereas Christine, Johnny and I were splitting the cab back to our own place.

It’s been a long time for me to finally chronicle this trip. As soon as I’ve penned this trip, I’m going to get to work on other trips that happened before it, as well as one or two that happened after it. It isn’t easy to remember everything this far in retrospect, and I must thank Christine and Jing in particular for helping by giving me a few little memory hooks here and there to build off in reconstructing the rest of things.

I don’t know for sure, but I think this was one of those defining trips. I could be wrong, but I think it’s something that the rest of us will be carrying with us for the whole of our lives. Aside from the drama, aside from the developments, which for me included at least a couple spectacular developments, this was a trip that brought 14 almost-strangers together on the most mad-capped journey any of them had ever taken, doing things that none of them had never done before, running to the crack of my verbal whip from one place to another to meet deadlines only really detailed in my mind, in a part of the world where most of them couldn’t communicate worth a damn, and for the most part, didn’t need to, because in the end, we had each other, and that was enough to get by.