Leaving Bangladesh on December 27th was something like wading through a sea of white. The international airport was flooded with devout Moslems preparing for their pilgrimage to Mecca. Due to this, the normal flight schedule seemed to have been severely disrupted. There were also lines and lines of young men about to jump on planes to work for a labour company in some other country. David and I were quite amused by their line-up strategy; they were parked about three feet from the immigration door, and with literally no space between them, they were squashed like sardines in an imaginary tube! We were relieved to find out that we could circumvent this line and walked through immigration with no trouble at all. Our next serious concern was to find our gate number, since we had seen no mention of our flight on the display screens and our boarding passes didn’t say anything either!

We moseyed around the airport, stopped for a meal at a new restaurant, meandered through the duty free (filled almost exclusively with alcohol and cigarettes!) stopped for some snacks, wandered down to the departure lounges, continually asking official-looking men about our China Eastern flight, finally to discover that we would be leaving from gate 6! On our way we went, through security, thinking we would finally be on our way, (at this point we were at least an hour late) only to sit down in the departure lounge to watch our plane arrive, see the passengers deplane, watch the refuel procedure, and finally………got to walk downstairs to the tarmac, be picked up by a bus, driven around in a huge circle and eventually dropped off in front of the airplane. The flight itself was uneventful; we had no immediate connection to make so we weren’t too concerned about being almost two hours late.

On our arrival in Kunming we went through passport control with no problem, picked up our luggage (having red suitcases is great….easy to spot!) and as we walked into the main arrival area we were presented with a business card, “For Indian Food, upstairs second floor!” Just what we wanted to experience in China!

We asked where the “Sight Seeing Hotel” was, since our travel agent had provided us with a free night, and his instructions were, “Just walk outside 100m”. So off we went, scanning the night scene for hotel-like places. Sure enough, there was one just across from the airport, but it only had four Chinese symbols. In any case, we took a chance and we were right! We were shown to a small, smoky room (it wasn’t actually smoky, it just smelled like smoke - bleargh - [David]), and only stayed there long enough to put on a couple more layers before we ventured out to find somewhere to eat! It was chilly! The hotel had a Chinese restaurant connected to it, so we ate a very filling meal there. The waitress provided us with a knife and fork, probably thinking we didn’t know how to use chopsticks, and when we asked her for some it took her a while to realize what we were asking for! Obviously “chopstick” is not an international term! After dinner we went to walk around and take some pictures, but that didn’t last very long as we were tired, and more importantly…..freezing! We have been too spoiled living in a warm climate!

We retired to our room, asking for a 6 am. wake up call to make our 8:10 flight. After flipping through exclusively Chinese speaking channels on the TV, we dozed off under as many blankets as we could find…