January 19 - Kunming to Lijiang, China

The journey to Kunming was almost derailed from the get-go. I showed up at the airport bus terminal in Seoul around 8:15pm, only to find the ticket window closed and the bus bays dark. The old security guards on the first floor informed me that the last bus was at 8pm, chuckling as if everyone learned this in kindergarten. Considering that my flight wasn't until 10:30pm, this still doesn't make a whole lot of sense.. to a last minute fella like me anyway. Thus, I had to pay a taxi $70 to drive me out there (1 hour from Gangnam).

Naturally this put a dent in my enthusiasm, as well as my budget, but once again I found there are merits to being late. As I was the last to show up at the boarding gate, I was informed that the econo section was all full, and I had been bumped up to business class, allowing me to board first before the line of disapproving passengers-to-be. China Air South's business class service is nothing to brag about, but the full service and three course meal got me over the taxi bill pretty quickly.

I arrived at 1:30am in Kunming, not exactly the best time to get acquainted with a new place. Of course there were the usual offers of overpriced taxi rides and hotels where the driver knows the hotel owner and gets a kickback. I had already booked a hotel through travelocity.com to avoid this hassle, but it turns out Travelocity was the one scamming me because I paid a western price for a ho-hum hotel when even the cost of the hotels the drivers were peddling were cheaper than this. For the price I paid, I could've easily had a 5-star hotel with all the trimmings... if I were Chinese, that is. As it goes in most tourist towns around the world, there's a domestic price and a foreigner price.

The next morning, I met my travel mate Wangyang at the airport, where she had flown in from her hometown of Shenzhen (southeastern China, near HongKong). For all you who don't know the story of the two of us, we met the year before as classmates in a Korean language institute in Seoul. At the time, she was living with her Korean fiance (now husband) and doing much better in the class than I was! We had time to kill until our next flight to Lijiang, so we walked around the city and explored a fruit market, in search of the mystic "durian", a painfully-spiked surfaced fruit with a custard-like inside. I had tried it many years back in NYC, but it didn't live up to its reputation as a fruit that "...smells like hell, tastes like heaven" (Wickipedia.com's Durian). Even in a land of wonderfully fresh, cheap and abundant fruit, the durian that we eventually found was unripe and costly. We left it behind as the thrill of the find dwindled and were faced with the reality of hauling it back to the airport.

The flight from Kunming to Lijiang was only 45 minutes and 700RMB ($85 roundtrip), where a bus ride would take around 8 hours. This was puzzling, until we saw the terrain we were flying over - an undeveloped, highway-less mountain range. On the flight to Lijiang, Wangyang taught me how to write my first Chinese word, 中国 (Chun-guo), the word for China. This is similar to Korean, chun-guk and the word the respective words for Korea, Han-guo, hanguk.

I didn't know what to make of Lijiang at first. As much as it was a "preserved ancient city", it struck me as a touristy shopping mall, replete with foreign wanderers and camera wielders. After we got situated though, it grew on me, and there was so much to take in visually that I let my guard down. There's no shortage of guesthouses, but the one we found was owned by a Naxi (indigenous people) family and home to an irresistable, ankle-biting mutt we named "Pinky" for his stylish wardrobe of doggie coats.

Yunnan food, as I was beginning to learn during lunch, is cooked in one way only - deeeep fried. Everything, from the bread to the meats, take a hot grease bath, except for maybe the veggies, which are then sauteed in at least a wading pool of oil. My stomach wasn't my biggest fan during these days.

I found it rather strange that one beer costs nearly as much as a night at a guesthouse (between 30-50RMB, or $4 to 6). It goes without saying that I was a little more concerned about blowing a hole in my intestinal track than in my wallet.

Click here for today's photos (Yahoo slideshow)