It's getting hard to see me from sideways on!
Yeah, right! Ah well, not having much of an appetite for the best part of a week is helping me look better in the blog photos anyhow (not that I'm going to put any on today).
I write this from an internet bar in Yuan Yang - a teeny tiny town on the top of a mountain/hill thing. It's supposed to be beautiful here and I'm sure the views are stunning out over the valley when the town is not immersed in cloud! So Pete and I have taken this as a sign to just have a bit of a rest day which we're quite happy with, ta very much. We were surprised to find an internet bar - it's a bit like going to Helmsley in North Yorks and finding a net bar with 50 PCs. A bit of a surprise. So I'm sat here listening to Zane Lowe's Thursday show catching up.
So, apart from lack of appetite, what's new? Well, from Kunming we decided to head south (towards Laos - we managed to find more Malarone courtesy of an Israeli bloke) via a route which seems to be a bit neglected by the small travelling set out here. Most people catch a 24 hour sleeper bus from Kunming down to the city of Jinghong right in the sub-tropical south, but I'm not a 24-hour bus kind of girl so I mapped us a route via a couple of small towns with some sights. And it's been really nice. The first place had a big hill with loads of temples - some nearly 2000 years old. It was devoid of tourists and was full of trees. I was really really peaceful and beautiful. I've loads of photos to upload when it's possible. It really was lovely.
What wasn't lovely was the karaoke. After 5 nights in Kunming's Hump Hostel which is a cracking hostel but is notorious for the noise as the rooms are over a cluster of discos, Faye, being the noise Hitler when going to sleep, was looking forward to a peaceful night's sleep in a small town. Not to be. Our hotel was home to karaoke rooms and after a tiring journey we were treated to not one but about five different karaoke renditions seemingly below our rooms. The noise was horrible - not only was this Chinese karaoke, but BAD Chinese karaoke. It was so bad it was funny.
I can't stress enough how noisy China is. I really think that if a Chinese person was somewhere quiet, they would be really unnerved. Everything is high volume here. I can now understand why buddhist monks become monks! Silence. Lovely stuff. Pete is turning Chinese though. Last night he couldn't sleep because it was too quiet!
Anyhow, China is still fascinating (don't take my moans of previous blogs to think I ever regret coming here). It's so diverse and really cannot be seen in a whistle-stop tour of a couple of weeks. The province of Yunnan that we're in now couldn't be scratched in 3 weeks, let alone the whole country. I really would recommend Yunnan to anyone for a holiday though. There's nothing like the Great Wall, but it's an amazing place.
So, for now I'm going to take it easy in this little town a 6 hour rickety scary mountain bus journey from anywhere else of any size. Top priority is to avoid the dog which we saw a woman blow-torching the fur off yesterday (ready for scoffing). For my family's sake, I won't put the photo on my site, I promise (as I was a bit traumatised as it was an entire dog and looked like a greyhound) but I can imagine it will end up on my beloved's if you do fancy a gruesome look. Give me a ham and pease pudding sarnie over that any day!
I write this from an internet bar in Yuan Yang - a teeny tiny town on the top of a mountain/hill thing. It's supposed to be beautiful here and I'm sure the views are stunning out over the valley when the town is not immersed in cloud! So Pete and I have taken this as a sign to just have a bit of a rest day which we're quite happy with, ta very much. We were surprised to find an internet bar - it's a bit like going to Helmsley in North Yorks and finding a net bar with 50 PCs. A bit of a surprise. So I'm sat here listening to Zane Lowe's Thursday show catching up.
So, apart from lack of appetite, what's new? Well, from Kunming we decided to head south (towards Laos - we managed to find more Malarone courtesy of an Israeli bloke) via a route which seems to be a bit neglected by the small travelling set out here. Most people catch a 24 hour sleeper bus from Kunming down to the city of Jinghong right in the sub-tropical south, but I'm not a 24-hour bus kind of girl so I mapped us a route via a couple of small towns with some sights. And it's been really nice. The first place had a big hill with loads of temples - some nearly 2000 years old. It was devoid of tourists and was full of trees. I was really really peaceful and beautiful. I've loads of photos to upload when it's possible. It really was lovely.
What wasn't lovely was the karaoke. After 5 nights in Kunming's Hump Hostel which is a cracking hostel but is notorious for the noise as the rooms are over a cluster of discos, Faye, being the noise Hitler when going to sleep, was looking forward to a peaceful night's sleep in a small town. Not to be. Our hotel was home to karaoke rooms and after a tiring journey we were treated to not one but about five different karaoke renditions seemingly below our rooms. The noise was horrible - not only was this Chinese karaoke, but BAD Chinese karaoke. It was so bad it was funny.
I can't stress enough how noisy China is. I really think that if a Chinese person was somewhere quiet, they would be really unnerved. Everything is high volume here. I can now understand why buddhist monks become monks! Silence. Lovely stuff. Pete is turning Chinese though. Last night he couldn't sleep because it was too quiet!
Anyhow, China is still fascinating (don't take my moans of previous blogs to think I ever regret coming here). It's so diverse and really cannot be seen in a whistle-stop tour of a couple of weeks. The province of Yunnan that we're in now couldn't be scratched in 3 weeks, let alone the whole country. I really would recommend Yunnan to anyone for a holiday though. There's nothing like the Great Wall, but it's an amazing place.
So, for now I'm going to take it easy in this little town a 6 hour rickety scary mountain bus journey from anywhere else of any size. Top priority is to avoid the dog which we saw a woman blow-torching the fur off yesterday (ready for scoffing). For my family's sake, I won't put the photo on my site, I promise (as I was a bit traumatised as it was an entire dog and looked like a greyhound) but I can imagine it will end up on my beloved's if you do fancy a gruesome look. Give me a ham and pease pudding sarnie over that any day!
posted by Faye @ 4:50 am
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