It is 9:15am in Kunming, China, and it is cold!!! I woke up and put on my jeans and a tank top, then proceeded to get my sweatshirt about 20 minutes later. Kunming is at an altitude of 1890m so it's no surprise that it's a bit chilly. Compare that to Madison at 264m. And the thing is, unless the sun comes out this is as warm as it's going to get for me in China -- Dali, Lijiang, and Zhongdian all get higher and higer up as I make my way in the direction of the Tibetan Plateau. (I'm not actually going into Tibet...just near it.)
And of course I wouldn't even be able to get into Tibet if I tried. Or if I wanted to. I had a hell of a time just getting into China. I had heard reports of Americans being throughly searched at immigration and I expected a bit of a hassle, both on the Vietnam side and the China side. Vietnam was a breeze. Sure, it took him about 10 minutes to look over my passport while dozens of Vietnamese walked on by without a single glance, but I made it through with no questions asked. Once I crossed the bridge to the Chinese immigration point, however, I was stopped completely. They searched my bag and found a book by the Dalai Lama, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality" I think it was called. Of course they confiscated it. I was finished reading it, so I didn't mind too much, but it's a shame that such a forward-thinking book will now be forever locked up or burned or whatever they decide to do with it. So in addition to that, they were skeptical of my Sex and the City DVD I bought in Hanoi, probably because it said "sex" and they thought it was pornography. They also confiscate Lonely Planet China guidebooks because the map shows Taiwan as a different color than the rest of China. Luckily mine didn't have Taiwan on the map, since it is for the Mekong region, but about five officers still combed through the entire book. I had copies of the Beijing sections of the LP China guide that they combed through. They made me take out every article of clothing in my bag. They paged through my notebooks. They opened every single pocket of my backpack and shuffled through it. They asked me question after question about my hard drive, then took it away for about 10 minutes to plug it in and browse through every file on it. (I'm just hoping they didn't accidentally delete any of the 35GB of music or 3,000+ photos I have on there.) This all took only about 45 minutes, but it was about 10:40 when they finished and I had a 10:50 bus to catch. And I didn't really know where the bus station was.
But luckily I made it to the bus station with about two minutes to spare. I met two other travellers and we are all staying at a hostel in Kunming. I'm hoping to jump on a train to Dali this afternoon and spend a few days there. Until then I'll probably just wander the street of Kunming for a bit.
