KUNMING

8TH - 10TH JULY

We arrived in Kunming with a very fast landing due to the airport having an extra long runway! It was an important area during world war 2 and was the base of the American Flying Tigers.

We transferred by taxi to our hotel which was not the most pleasant of places, 3 rooms later we finally got a room with a working loo, but the sink had a massive big hole underneath it where some kind of casual work was being done in a vague effort to fix whatever was wrong with it! There was uproar within the group as most of the rooms hadn’t been cleaned or if they had then they hadn’t been done to a particularly great standard, Greg got on the case and had a massive row in Chinese with the manager and cleaning staff. The cleaning staff started to re-clean but seemed to think that it was perfectly Ok to clean the whole room with the same cloth, and guess where they started yeap
in the loo!!! So after cleaning the loo they then went onto the rest of the room including the phone, hygiene and Chinese people are not two words that are particularly go hand in hand - I guess sometimes its better just no to see - ignorance is bliss and all of that!

Greg hadn’t been to Kunming for over a year and had warned us that the Chinese have a habit of just knocking anything down from the past however historic it is and replacing it with ugly concrete blocks, he wasn’t wrong! Its crazy to think that a nation with such a rich culture has so much disregard for its own past, most cities would kill to have such a rich mix of historic building but not here, it’s a crying shame, they certainly aren’t leaving any old relic’s for future generations to marvel over.

We found