Fuddland

Tearing ourselves away from the beauty and tranquility of Duōyīshù (多依树) and the surrounding countryside of Yuányáng (元阳) was hard, but we also wanted to go and see the famous scenery of the Lí River (漓江) in Guǎngxī (广西), which meant we had to first get back to Kūnmíng (昆明) in order to catch a train to Guìlín (桂林).

The bus that we had originally caught heading south from Kūnmíng to Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇) in Yuányáng left in the mid-morning and took about eight hours. So, when boarding the return bus at half past four in the afternoon, we were figuring on being back in Kūnmíng somewhere between midnight and one o’clock in the morning — not ideal, but not too bad.

But when the bus turned out to be of the sleeper variety — comprising no seats but two rows of bunk-beds along either side of the aisle — we started to suspect that we were in for a longer ride than we were banking on. Neither of us had been on a sleeper bus before, and the experience was a lot less comfortable than the comparatively-luxurious sleeper train carriages. The duvet covers provided were a hotch-potch of children’s designs [we had Pokemon], all of dubious levels of cleanliness. Smoking was allowed throughout, and the driver’s reckless confidence at handling the mountain bends had Mary cutting off the blood-flow to my hand for most of the evening.

In order to warrant the use of a sleeper bus, it seems that the driver had been instructed to stretch out the journey as much as possible, so we found ourselves making many more stops than on the way down, and of course given that any and all activities in China must stop dead at mealtimes, there was an extended break beside an outdoor restaurant a few hours after we first set off. [Having spent so much time getting comfortable in our twin top bunk, we opted to stay aboard and chow down on the snacks we had brought with us.]

It was now well past sunset and there were so many more stops for toilet breaks and the like that eventually we just stopped trying to ascertain where we were and, after some reassuring of Mary that I would do my level best to prevent the driver from careening off the mountainside, we drifted off to a restless sleep.

At some point I half-woke up, enough to notice that we had yet again stopped for some reason, and caught a glimpse of another bus parked immediately in front of us. I almost wondered what was going on, but it was still pitch dark and I instead immediately fell back to sleep.

Some time later, Mary and I both woke up to find it was daylight, but we still weren’t moving and, moreover, I saw that the same bus was still parked in front of us. We then noticed that there were yet more buses parked all around us. We were, we had to deduce, in a bus station. Kūnmíng Station, to be precise, and had been there since before whenever it was that I had woken up.

It was gone nine o’clock on the morning. Sitting at the front of the bus, chatting around a charcoal fire in a metal bucket, were the driver and the bus attendant. The rest of the bus was completely empty, and all the beds had been made up. We had arrived in Kūnmíng in the middle of the night, but rather than wake up the dozing foreigners, they just let the rest of the passengers disembark around us and then allowed us sleep for about five more hours, which meant that we had missed the possibility of catching a morning train on to Guìlín. I still can’t decide if their hearts were in the right place or they simply didn’t care whether we were still fast asleep when the bus started making its way all the way back to Yuányáng.