Day 01 of our 21 day trip to Yunnan and Western Sichuan has just started. Random notes and comments!
Our start point of this trip is Dali, which if one considers linear distance isn’t that far from Singapore actually. The entire journey though took 13 hours from our flight taking off to our getting to our hotel in the small city. The two flights with Thai Airways with the stopover in Bangkok and to Kunming were uneventful, with each flight about 2 hours. One benefit of this approach was that we were at least fed well: the first flight leg we got breakfast, and lunch for the second. Both times, the Thai Airways crew worked very fast in their meal and beverage services.
The downside of how we got to our start point was of course the amount of time it took us! It went down like this:
5:15AM – left Minton and made our way fo Changi Airport Terminal 2
8:20AM to 9:35AM – Thai Airways TG404 Singapore to Bangkok, and Thailand time is one hour behind Singapore.
10:55AM to 2:05PM – Thai Airways TG612 Bangkok to Kunming, and China is in the same time zone as Singapore. Immigration at Kunming took a while, and I was served by a not very pleasant officer who thundered at me – because his thumbprint reading machine couldn’t read my fingerprints quickly enough.
3:45PM to 4:15PM – Didi ride from Kunming Airport to Kunming Railway Station. Station was pretty busy.
6:16PM to 8:25PM – High Speed Rail from Kunming to Dali. The first class seats we booked were relatively pricey [not anywhere near Japan’s Shinkansen pricing though], but it afforded a very comfortable ride to Dali.
8:40PM to 9:20PM – Our hotel in Dali arranged a pick-up for us at Dali Railway Station.
9:20PM – Arrival at our first place of stay, Z Garden where we’d be staying for two nights.
My first impression, though this is actually my third visit to China: electric vehicles everywhere, traffic in Kunming was orderly and streets were cleaned, lots of people smoking, and the locals cut queue like no tomorrow. We quickly dropped off our luggage at Z Garden as the kids were ravenous. The lad who was manning the reception at the hotel recommended a restaurant that was an easy 3 minute walk from the hotel, and it was still opened at 9:30PM for dinner. The hotel is located in the Dali Ancient Town area, and the street was very prettily lit.
That’s it for our pretty tiring Day 01, and it was only trying to get to our starting point for the actual tour that would begin tomorrow. More notes to come soon!