No blog entries for poor Kunming, mostly because it was replete with laziness. Well, not it so much as me, but the reason stands, and there's only so much writing one can do about frantically trying to learn Vietnamese with an iPhone app and a Lonely Planet phrasebook before plunging headlong into Hanoi, or about playing even more pool, or about stumbling across a Chinese conference on homosexuality taking place in our hostel but unfortunately getting there in time only for the scintillating lectures on how to write professional emails.

We did hike at XiShan, a misty mountain a few miles west, but Chinese hiking mostly entails walking on the shoulder of the road getting honked at by tour buses. There was one side path with a woman selling pineapple on it, but aside from her it was mostly murderous stairs. Luckily, the climate here is completely unlike everywhere else in China. At an elevation of about 6500 feet, its air has trouble holding the pollution it forms (or something - it's clean, anyway) and its temperature is best described as 'room'.

On the way back from the mountain, we stumbled upon another frog-torture-esque night market (but perhaps less graphic due to high fish content and low everything else content) the difference being that this one had a lady standing off to the side spit-grilling whole fish wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed with herbs for RMB 12. I wasn't going to let the frankly hygienically appalling conditions stop me from getting a piece of that (really, when have I?) and it was delicious, especially eaten squatting on a stool next to Julian and some others eating makeshift market hotpot. The only reason he acquiesced to this hotpot was to get me a pair of chopsticks as quickly as possible before my fish got cold. (The fish griller didn't have chopsticks, but she offered me a glove to hold it with while I gnawed. I was afraid the herbs would fall out if I did that.)

Tomorrow we train it to Nanning, where we can catch a direct train to Hanoi instead of fooling around with the sketchy overnight buses and land border around Hekou/Lao Cai . This was the original plan, but one too many Internet horror stories about bag-slitting thieves, extortionate border taxis, unreliable customs procedures and bathroom-less eight hour bus trips had us searching for an alternative.

Assuming Vietnamese firewalls are as easily fooled by the addition of the Korean suffix to Blogger's website address as Chinese ones are, you will hear from me there.