A friend and I decided to hell with the fact that Chinese Spring Festival is the worst time of year to travel, we passed around the lube, bent over and with big bearing grins prepared for the exorbitant pain prices that we would pay for airfare and to stay in hotels at this time of year.

Our sketchy travels plans were something to the order of: go down to Kunming in Yunnan provinces, get acquainted with the scene there, get some visas to enter the member in training of the axis of evil (Burma), fly up to the fabled Lijiang to experience more tourist stalls per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world, then fly back to Kunming and onwards to Rangoon.

Lots of trees and foliage lined the streets in Kunming making the city like a jungle…if you were to make the buildings, roads, people and cars magically disappear.

Kunming was an administration stop, because I like to do the planning for my vacations while I’m actually on vacation. It adds a certain sense of urgency, panic and stress that make the memories fonder. So while we were running around booking hotels, flights, and filling out the 20 odd forms you need to get into Burma, we only managed to grab a mere glimpse of Kunming. Like seeing a naked obese man roll around in jello, a glimpse was more than enough.

Kunming is a cold city. They call it the city of eternal spring, but I would say it’s more like the city of eternal stupidity for not installing a heating system anywhere when in January and February the temperature regularly hovers between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade. I know this is common in southern cities, but Kunming’s altitude of 2000 some odd meters exacerbates the problem. Not only do most places not have heating (hospitals, hotels, modern shopping centers, airports), but they actually open up all the doors and windows, like saying “hey, our balls aren’t quite shrunk enough, lets make them even smaller!” It wouldn’t have been so bad had I brought adequate clothing, but I was again fooled by the lies of weather reports, when I should have known that it’s always 5 degrees colder, sun means smog, clouds mean rain, and rain means volcanic firestorms of hell.

Kunming does have some nice things. For example, the bird market is a great place to buy birds, contract bird flu, or to get a shiny new bong. Yunnan is poor as shit (3rd poorest province in China), so most food is much cheaper than in the east coast cities. I was able to acquire a proper breakfast at not one, but TWO different cafes, which is an infinite multiple of the number of places where this is possible in Qingdao. Yunnan food in general is very spicy and it seems easier to get a greater variety of foods than in the Shandong. Also worth noting, the people here seemed to be more “arty” or whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. There were more punk/goth hairstyles and fashions and people seemed to be more willing to go against the grain of mainstream Chinese style, which for your information is pure blandness with cheap unnecessary frill.

The traffic situation reminds me of that scene in Terminator 2, where the machines napalm the entire city of LA and all the cars are just stuck with unconvincing looking skeletons inside them, blocking the roads and highways. Despite silent swarms of e-bikes nearly flying into you whenever you tried to cross the street, there were cars gridlocked to the point of making driving a car totally fucking retarded. There’s no subway, and of course buses got stuck in the jam too. Walk you say? We were on a strict budget of time, and laziness would not permit a deviation from that. Every taxi ride would take about 45 minutes even though we were going roughly 3 or 4 km. According to one enlightened taxi driver, this is because of the dearth of highways in Kunming, and that one of the two ring roads was completely shut down for renovations. He also claimed that Kunming has the highest car per capita ratio of any city in China.

Before leaving Kunming, we figured it would be best if we picked up some anti-malarial medicine for the trip to Burma. While I seriously doubted it would come into use, being the dry season and lack of mosquitoes, common sense said it was better to be safe, then to get really sick, die and wind up as a ghost haunting the set of some campy Thai daytime soap opera. Funny thing those Kunming hospitals, because none of them seemed to know what malaria was! The one doctor, who had heard of it at some point in med school, directed us to the center of disease control of Kunming. Once there we were told to go to the 8th floor, where one of the doctors who wasn’t hard at work cooking instant noodles finding a cure for AIDS, told us the obvious, they didn’t have any there, maybe we should try the airport. The airport!? The airports here can barely serve up what some might call food, yet alone a series of meds that would protect one against a harmful virus! Giving up hope, we decided to say no to drugs and hope that the malarial mosquitoes were busy with other people…like certain individuals in Kunming.

Our time in Kunming quickly and thankfully came to a close, and it was on to the ancient Lijiang for old buildings, naxi food, things blowing up, and tigers leaping gorges in no particular order.

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There were alot of these old school styled tea shops selling…tea all packaged weird in traditional style bags. Yunnan coffee was despite its growing popularity, much harder to find.

The bird market!! :

Among the treasures we found in the bird market was this Rubik’s cube for people who are angry at Micheal Phelps, and a store that he might enjoy:

Lotus bulbs

For some reason the fruit was all hideous looking, I mean, look at those shriveled oranges, and look at those…uhh…things:

Filed under: tourist shit