After sending two large boxes of B's belongings back home, fitting our lives into a couple of small bags, the time has finally come to leave Shanghai. A moment for which I am eternally grateful.

It was necessary to purchase a few supplies for the trip, mainly a suitable rucksack for B, some natural mosquito repellant and a pacsafe security bag device. (Well worth the investment for traveling).

It was rather interesting to be greeted with B's face while shopping, it seems she is always watching me.




Although in a little shock of the limited number of shoes she could carry, B was pretty calm about being homeless.

We decided at the last moment to purchase flights to Kunming in the South East of China, flights cost 1100rmb, around 120 euros each. Like every airport Pudong is vastly over priced so its better to take food with you, especially if you tend not to be a meat eaters like our-self's. A couple of miniature whiskeys and bags of peanuts helped us pass the time.

Its curious that you are forbidden to carry liquids over 100ml, yet you can quite happily carry a crate of live crabs onto a flight, that's China for you.


 


The flight to Kunming was fairly straight forward and took around 3.5 hours. We had arranged a cheap hosted in Kunming through Booking.com. A private room with shared wash facilities cost us 196rmb total for 2 days, around 25 euros.

The Hostel was nothing really to write home about, just a simple backpackers room, it did however have some rather strange Asian erotic art, with animal voyeurism. Someone clearly like this as the same picture was all over the hostel.




Kunming is vastly different than Shanghai, one thing visitors will realize is the lack of internet access to western sights. VPN's and proxys dont work too well here, information is restricted to a huge degree.


 

We located a local coffee house called Maan Coffee, free limited internet (very frustrating) but extremely good fruit smoothies and meals at a very reasonable price. Now the plan was to take some photos of the food for the blog, however as the food came it looked so appealing that we completely forgot and just ate it, so sorry about that...

The bear that you see is how the staff find your table. It was a great place to relax for a few hours before catching the sleeper bus we would be on for over 25 hours.





Tickets for the bus where available at the south coach station, this was easily to find as the metro went straight there.

As for my impressions of Kunming, I can only say it felt like every advertising company in the world went there to throw up. Like a lot of China, Kunming is undergoing huge building and expansion programs in a bid to create a home consumer market, needed to offset the fall of export GDP since the 2008 European financial crisis.

It is hard to see how China will actually manage this owing to the fact that there are so many people living in poverty. Walking into any of the huge department store in Kunming you will find yourself in an eery ghost town setting. Apart form the sales assistants, there is just no one else in there.




Having always been an avid reader of Chinese philosophy and a practitioner of the beautiful martial art of wing chun, I was always very excited to visit China. I understand now why Lao Tzu left in around 640BC.

In my opinion China has not only mirrored the capitalist virus that is consuming the world, brain washing humans into mindless halfwits that are educated into stupidity. They have taken this to a level far greater, they are in a building frenzy, all of which is based in debt. When the bubble finally burst in China I foresee global consequences.


Needless to say I have no plans to return anytime soon.