China: Day 2, Part 1 - On Arriving to a Cold Reception

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be – Douglas Adams

So we landed in Kunming via Bangkok, a long trip aboard the rather pleasant Thai Airlines. We did have our share of inconveniences, mostly with regards to airline food. By default, we were handed 'Hindu' non-veg meals. 'Hindu' probably translates to sweet pumpkin in Thai, because that's what we got. And dessert that tasted like mud. Sweet mud. But mud, nevertheless.

The Suvarnabhoomi airport in Bangkok is large, and incredibly beautiful. A reminder of the influence Hinduism has had in the predominantly Buddhist country. But more importantly about the importance of shopping to our lives and the Thai economy. By the time a person arrives at their terminal, they find themselves going through enough duty-free distractions to last their wallet.

To escape the temptations, we chose instead to collapse on a some comfortable chairs and pass out for many hours. Escape we did, though food took a significant portion of our daily quota of thriftiness.

The trip from Bangkok to Kunming was in a rather empty flight, where the stewards and hostesses were awfully nice and we got sufficient refills of red wine. What was striking was the rather conspicuous absence of Indian faces. I had never before been to a place where I saw no Indians. It was certainly a new experience for the both of us.

We reached Kunming early afternoon; the cold weather hitting our faces as we gasped for breath. There wasn't any appealing sight ahead of us, no faces plastered in artificial smiles as we had seen at Bangkok, only uniform-clad men and women staring down at us. We walked slowly through the immigration counters, a deathly silence around us.

You often see people attempt to smile at airport officials in an attempt to not look suspicious. Out here most passengers had dropped the pretense.It didn't matter. The Chinese official does not care and smiling might just single you out for being unusually happy on a cold drab Kunming morning.
It was an intimidating walk through bureaucratic hurdles. Especially with signs every few meters about how smugglers could be sentenced to death by law.

We have no photographs of the interior of the airport partly because I was too scared to whip my camera out. (I imagined a dozen armed uniforms coming down at me as I screamed incoherently and took photographs of my imminent captors.) But mostly because the absence of English disoriented us. We had a rough idea of where we were going, but no idea what the Chinese called it. We walked around making conversation with random officials in the hope that one of them would understand us. Some scowled, others smiled apologetically. We finally did find one polite lady official, who scribbled the address in Chinese. We thanked our luck, as we would find ourselves doing repeatedly over the next many days.

We dodged the various touts who promised us 100 yuan taxi rides, and caught ourselves a licensed taxi, driven by a nice burly woman.
This was our first experience of a Chinese city, and we were impressed. We had read a lot of negative reviews about the traffic in Kunming, but as I sat in the taxi that I realized how differently Indians viewed the world compared to the West. Having survived most of my life in crowded cities with minimal urban planning, where single flyovers takes years to build and we learn to adapt to inconveniences, Kunming was an urban heaven. We almost never touched the ground as we smoothly criss-crossed the city on the many flyovers.

Later, after having watched our taxi driver fight away a lot more touts on our behalf and guide us into the bus terminal, we were finally happily settled for our next stop Dali.