There and Back Again: The Journey from Kunming to Noto

After another day in Kunming, I said my farewells to Colleen and began my long journey home.  My extensive travel schedule would begin at Saturday morning and would end with my arrival at home Monday morning with transfers at Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Nanao and Anamizu respectively. The first leg of the journey, the flight from Kunming to Beijing started out without a hitch but began to go terribly, terribly wrong when I landed and was waiting for my luggage. After waiting around the conveyor belt for an hour, I made my way to the information booth and started saying “no luggage” “no luggage” over and over in the hopes that someone would understand. Someone did thankfully but all they could get across to me was that my luggage would be coming 3 hours later (I still have no idea why! Did they put it on the wrong plane?) When I heard this my immediate thought was “here we go again Chinese airports let round 2 of your torture begin`` and Lewis Blacks’ AirlineTraveler’s Prayer raced through my mind. When I finally acquiring my luggage after the three-hour wait, I went to the terminal to try and change my flight time as I had missed my layover flight to Shanghai. After being pointed towards the wrong booth five times I finally found the manager and we did our best to communicate. I eventually gathered that there were no more flights to Tokyo that day (really?!) and that I would have to wait until tomorrow to catch my flight. With that I was once more whisked off to another hotel by this airline, this time in Beijing. Unfortunately, I was too far away from all the main sites to do any site seeing but that probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway as Beijing was experience some truly nasty smog and I could hardly even walk a few minutes outside without struggling to breathe.

The next day, I finally made my way to Shanghai and then to Tokyo where I landed around 9 o’clock. At this point, I only had 2 hours to get all the way through customs at Narita to my bus at Shinjuku station, which left at 11 o'clock . The airport bus arrived at Shinjuku at about 11:01pm and thus began my mad dash to the bus with me screaming like a maniac person at nearby people to get out of the way and dashing madly across traffic to reach my bus on time. By the grace of Buddha, the kami, or whatever god I pleased with my numerous shrine and temple visits, I made it to my bus at the last possible minute and was on my way home!

Terrible smog in Beijing

Thus ended my hectic, enlightening, miserable, and fantastic winter break. I had the privilege to see a pretty comprehensive mosaic of what life is like in contemporary East Asia. From the modern and high-tech streets of Tokyo, to the lively and developing streets of Kunming, to the rustic and poor village of Manmai, East Asia certainly is a dynamic and diverse place. However, there is still so much more for me to see and learn, so here’s to the next adventure.