On to the most innuendo-rife city in the world

A scant few hours after I left Hong Kong, I touched down in Bangkok. The flight was pretty uneventful, aside from the weird whining kid next to me, who apparently pissed his pants or something while I was asleep, forcing his mother to awkwardly wake me so she could go clean him up, as well as fetching a wallet that I spotted another guy had left behind before leaving the airline.

Other than that, I made my way to the end of the line at the airport, and made my way through yet another immigration and customs department with little trouble. From there, I made my way straight to an airport express bus that would take me straight to Khao San Road, a backpacker’s haven in Bangkok, where I’d look randomly for lodgings. I was pretty much the first on the bus, and took a seat close to the door so I’d have an easy way out when it came time. Eventually, the bus was fully packed.

Canto-town

Currently I’m sitting on an island off of Thailand burnt to a crisp thanks to the harsh sun here, so I thought I’d take the day to catch up with a bit of my traveling.

And so it begins, again

I left just over a week ago from my comfortable life in Shanghai to explore Southeast Asia for the next month, as I have a decent break between semesters.

My plan was to go to Vietnam first, and by train. Long story short, that didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to visa issues. But, it wasn’t too big of a deal. In any event, my first step was to take a train from Shanghai to Shenzhen, several hours after celebrating my friend David’s birthday party.

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).

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

Our last morning in Dali was a short, simple and sweet one.

Dallying in Dali

So we woke up to another day, another dollar in Dali. Group B, the group leaving this day, were going to try to go to Erhai Lake to see cormorant fishing, or something like that. To do so, they were getting up pretty early, the rest of us were getting a milder start to our day so that we could further enjoy the rest of the day.

Dali Days (no pictures)

So we got up in the morning, after sleeping hard in the wake of the Gorge. We weren’t really in a rush to get going, so some people did a bit of last minute shopping in the Lijiang area, getting scarves and such. I looked around for one that I thought my mom would like, but the shopkeepers would only give me foreigner prices, and wouldn’t bargain down at all, so I gave it up, though I was able to find one cheap scarf that I thought would look good for myself. Aside from some Tibetan prayer flags I had bought at the marketplace in Shangri-la, these were the only souvenirs I had purchased so far.