After purchasing tickets for the next boat we had some time to kill. As soon as we left the terminal building to have some breakfast, a big group of men gathered around us, everyone trying to talk with us in Chinese. We took our language guide and tried to say a few words in Chinese which always ended up in big laughter. One young guy though was very interested to have english translations and soon he took the book and started writing them down together with the pronunciation in Chinese characters. We had to repeat some words ten times until he found syllables in Chinese that fitted more or less. Later, after the group of men had disappeared, a lady joined us and together we practiced some english for almost 2 hours.
A tuk-tuk took us from the port on Weizhou island to the main town where our hostel was. We drove through banana plantations and thick green vegetation, it looked pretty damn amazing! The main town only seemed to exist of fishermen. The men brought back the nights catch an the women sold it on the market, from all sorts of fish to mussels, eels, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and even turtles were available in the restaurants. This made it hard for us to find vegetarian food and we ended up eating plain noodles. All the other meals afterwards we had in a bar run by a German married to a Chinese girl, where the menu was in english. The next day we got ourselves an electric bike (after an accident with a tourist on a motorbike the whole island decided to buy electric powered scooters) and explored the relatively small island (6 x 6.5 km), spent time on beautiful deserted beaches and found an old catholic church, one of the two sights on Weizhou. All in all we really enjoyed some island time but it wasn't as beautiful as we first thought, no nice beaches near the hostel, the water not always clean and quite heavy waves, so we left on the third day, back to Beihai.
There we wanted to buy tickets and move straight away to Kunming in the west but there was no train this day so we booked tickets for the next. The ticket selling lady looked into the computer screen and asked us if we want a seats or beds. We wanted beds and without looking back to the screen she just said that there are no beds... After instructions of the staff in the hostel in Beihai we tried to find a street with restaurants but as so often with instructions from Chinese people we ended up somewhere else. Instead we wandered through the harbour. Beihai really is a weird place, traditional fishermen, normal Chinese town feeling in one area, big avenues and glass towers in another, we couldn't figure out this city.
The train ticket was surprisingly cheap and we didn't expect the best. The first train was crowded and we had to fight for our seats. The second train left from Nanning and was a bit more spacious. A bit. I am not the tallest on earth but these seats were tiny! Not the best way to start a 13 hours journey. In the train smoking was prohibited but not in the area where the carriers are connected, where you get in and out of the train and after an hour the whole train was filled with smoke. Around 18:00 the whole train suddenly came alive, all the passengers started to unpack food. The most famous dish was a 3 minute noodle soup in a cardboard box, there was even a tap inside the train which provided hot water and everyone started to walk up and down the aisles to get to the water and soon the only noise was that of 100 Chinese slurping their noodle soups. We spent the time reading and were listening to music, had a chat with other passengers (or they with us), tried to fight against the hurting back and to find some sleep. Absolutely tired we arrived early in the morning in Kunming and went straight to bed. The next days we didn't do much more than walking around the pretty city, visiting a buddhist temple and read. How we love those rooftop terraces in the Chinese hostels!
From Kunming we first wanted to go north-west to Dali and up into the mountains but after studying the weather forecast we soon realised that the clothes we would need were all in a box on the way to Europe, we got rid of them in Hong Kong. So we decided to head south instead to an area with the lovely name of Xishuangbanna. The bus took again 2 more hours than expected, not only because of the flat tire somewhere in the mountains and I had a fight with a rude lady behind me who thought the curtains only belong to her. Her small boy wasn't much better, his shrieks were so loud we couldn't turn the music any louder and in the end he even started to spit at us. Finally in Jinghong, after checking in to the hostel, we went straight for dinner. We found a very good café where they serve Chinese and western food and it became our favourite place to eat. The next day was Annis birthday. We started it with a huge lunch in the mentioned café and walked through the beautiful botanical garden. Then it was time for a massage. We read about a massage place where only blind people work and a full body massage costs only 6€. After some troubles with the awful Lonely Planet maps we found it and could go in straight away. And then the torture started. It was my first professional massage and by then I knew why. This little skinny fellow had such power in his hands that I wondered why people actually spend money to get so violently mistreated for an hour. It was what I call a "traditional Russian massage" and the whole day after this nightmare my neck was sore. Anni seemed happy with the treatment, she got rid of her back pain, though she agreed that it was "quite powerful". Maybe I'll try it again but then it'll hopefully be in Thailand. Those Thai girls are not that strong, are they?
Now we were already in the very south of China and there's a lot of rainforest around Jinghong but we decided to move on, leave China and do the jungle stuff in Laos. We booked tickets to Luang Nam Tha in Laos's north and might hit the jungle again, just as we did in Bolivia. This trip through the Amazon was so amazing that we really wanna do some serious jungle trekking again.
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