Day 5 - Lugu Hu Boatride/Return to Kunming

leaving the hostel in the morning

breakfast with the HK crew. rice porrige and hard boiled eggs. we looked over at the other table and saw our driver eating yummy noodles instead of bland rice porridge!

i was too tired to do anything crazy, except spanking people

the mountain we were on the day before

this island was the home to Joseph Rock who was an american and lived there for 27 years studying the minority peoples language i think. someone said he coined the name Shangri-La

wat a life. just laying in the sun all morning on this island. i wanted to punch his face off

i'm loving the chinese deer representations. I think i want to do an illustration with these guys somehow.


first time i've seen a pheonix/bird on the corners

i liked how i got this single bird flying over the 11 am sun

a view from halfway up the mountain. the sky is so blue and so is the lake. you could mistake these shots as the sky but look! it's the lake! my camera sucks and didn't capture the intense blue very well but you get the idea right? pretty amazing.

back in Lijiang. we stayed another night at another hostel. we tried to find the most local place we could instead of a tourist trap. This one seemed pretty good. we ate this chicken hot pot type thing that is a big Naxi dish. it was expensive

and look what we pulled out! a chicken head and chicken foot. yummy. just kidding

we rode this double decker back to Kunming to get our plane back to Beijing. 8 hrs. we sat in the very back, that is where our seat was assigned. i was excited about our good seats until lily pointed out that the seats where concave and were forcing us into hunchback shapes. for the next 8 hrs i was not excited about our seats.
In Kunming people were just walking down these tracks like it was a street.

One very funny thing that i didn't get to take a picture of was about 7 hrs into the 8 hr return home in the chinese van a sound started coming from the front right wheel. the driver said that there was so much dust and dirt from the road that the brakes didn't work now. we all thought he was exaggerating or kidding a little. but after all that uphill climbing we now had to go downhill and he had to go really slow and use the emergency brake! His solution was get back in the van and turn the music volume up louder so we didn't have to hear the sound of the brakes destroying themselves. That poor guy. his van is destroyed. renting the whole van for those 2 days, including his semi tourguide services, 8 hrs to 8hr back, including gas and all the damage to his van was 750 rmb total ($109). that means $16 each person.