Kunming, China

Here we are in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, in China's southwest. It was a 2 hour flight from Vientiane, Laos.  Off the plane the temperature of this part of Asia is much cooler. A very acceptable spring like climate. Probably early 20s if that. We arrived with no accomodation booked and quickly found the airport was holding no useful resources for achieving this. We also decided not to trust the tout dressed like a used car salesman despite his insistance that he had a "very nice car". We hopped in a taxi illprepared - we had a hotel address only in pinyin, which we got someone in the airport to convert to chinese script for the driver. However it turned out the address was wrong. So on a wild goose chase we went in a rather large city. The taxi driver was extremely tolerant of our lack of Chinese speaking (he had no English - like most people here), and did the detective work by yelling out the window for directions from people on the street. "Wu bu jie dou", was the common answer = "I dont know".  Luckily taxis are very cheap in China, and they definately dont try and give you the run around. Took us probably 30mins to realise the person at the airport had written Mingtong Road, and not Mingtong Alley which is where we should have been going. We finally made it , the taxi driver slapped me on the back with a laugh as he saw us off, and luckly the hotel had a room for us ! Was actually a lot of fun, and in the process we got a quick look at some areas of the city, and also the notion that foreigners are not that common here. We were generally stared at, smiled at, laughed at, and waved at from bemused spectators on the street.