Westwards and Upwards

It's been a few days of travelling around and some grouchiness--none
of which make for exciting writing.

We left Guilin on a morning train to Nanning and the caught an
afternoon-overnight train to Kunming in Yunnan. It is very clear that
the trains in China are designed to move a maximum amount of people
from place to place rather than to conform to any idea of "civilized."
The first leg was noisy and we were packed in tight into seats that
didn't fit me well; we even had to sit across the aisle from each
other and neither of us were able to look out the window and the
marvelous scenery. Of course, there were a few practically empty cars
in the front.

As an interlude, we loaded up on tropical fruit at Nanning.
Apparently, their longans are famous. Personally, I've liked the
rambutans best this trip.

On the next leg we were in soft sleeper which, while still low on
luxury and privacy, was good for scenery looking--many nice pictures
were taken. Tara slept poorly, so when we got to Kunming we
immediately checked into our hotel and slept for a few hours.

We then had a nice day wandering around the city, which our guidebook
describes as the Seattle of China. And the sun was finally
shining--and burning us. However, our guidebook turned out to be
woefully behind the times (published 18 months ago).

Everything in China is changing at an incredible pace. Restaurants
and bus stations move and every time the book says "2 flights a week"
it turns out there are now 2 a day. Unfortunately it turned out that
Kunming's old muslim quarter was mostly missing now--3/4 of it has
been cleared to build luxury apartments. At least we still got a
tasty meal in the remainder.

As is our style, we hiked way too far around town and saw some parks
and a lovely Buddhist temple. One of these days, I'm going to go back
in and fill some photos back in these essays.

The next day I was feeling ill and we were pretty lazy until our
evening flight to Lijiang, up at the edge of the Himalayas. But
that's for the next story.