POPCORN KRISTEN!
First and foremost, I would like to give a shout out to my sugar momma Kelly for throwing the cash at me when I have none.
Now, after said valuable items were deemed officially lost, Kelly was so kind to point out that it really wasn't a tragedy because the real tragedy would be if I lost my phone and couldn't call the four numbers I received. Point taken. We shopped around the cute Lijiang Old Town, which had a lot of minority presence and had a bit of an Arabic twist.
The next day we woke up bright and early, started our day off right with a banana and honey pancake from our host Mama Naxi, and then headed out to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge (the longest, deepest and narrowest gorge in-the-world). I feel so lucky that we ended up in the van with the people we did. We hiked with them for the next two days, and I must say they were pretty darn cool. Monica has dreds, and they looked amazing on her. My favorite quote of the trip, (in British accent), "Yea, I'll see girls walking around with dreds, and I'm like, 'Ew, that girl's got dreds.' and then I'm like, 'Shit, I've got dreds.'" Hearing their travel stories gives me the "travel fever." The more I hear about, the more places I want to go. Anyway, it was a tough hike. The hike up has "28 bends," which are 28 hard cuts zigzagging into the mountain. We thought we were about a third of the way up, when we reached a sign that said, "Welcome to the 28 bends!" Great. Luckily there was a woman there who offered us a choice of, "apples, oranges, water, marijuana, crackers?" Anyway, the hike was BEAUTIFUL. The most beautiful experience of my life. Imagine being in a fish bowl of HUGE mountains! Then imagine running into TWO of your friends from UNC at the highest peak of the mountain. Yup, that really happened.
After finishing up the hike, we had to catch a ride back to Old Town. Of course all of the buses were done for the day, and all of the cab drivers were trying to rip us off. Luckily we met some other foreigners and had power in numbers, found a cheap ride, and lucky-for-them didn't go back and spit on the guys trying to rip us off. We arrived back at the bus station, and I had about a 5 minute mourning period/moment of silence for my lost things. Then we took an overnight, SEATED bus back to Kunming, and I'll cut to the chase and say I do NOT wish that experience on anyone. We arrived at 7am, did not lose anything, congratulated ourselves, and then headed off to the Stone Forest, which is essentially Stonehenge on crack...a lot of crack. It was there that our fame peaked with a 20-photo photo shoot. We then went to wait for the bus back to Kunming, so we could attempt to fly home, and naturally, it was running almost an hour late (and we did NOT have an hour). Once we boarded and rode off, the bus made about eight stops in which the bus driver would hop off and mysteriously disappear for awhile. Meanwhile, I'm drowning myself in the Chinese Soap Opera playing overhead so I don't think about who I'm going to strangle when we miss our flight. We arrive to Kunming with no time to spare...and no cabs in sight. We begrudgingly agree to take an unmarked cab (ie: a bright blue sports car) to the airport because it's essentially our only choice. Well, we arrive, they accept my crumbled police reports as a legitimate passport replacement, we fly home.......and end our long, wonderful, eventual week.....at Smugs. *sigh*
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