The Lost Garden

                                                                       

We arrived in Kunming yesterday an hour and a half late, due to a long wait on the tarmac in Beijing.   We were impressed on our way to the guesthouse with how GREEN this city is.  So many Chinese cities are grey, grey, grey.  The streets here are lined with Southern magnolias, ficus, and huge bougainvilleas trained into trees, plus many other trees I have no clue about.  Some of the smaller streets have trees that arch over and touch, forming cool, shady tunnels.

The Lost Garden Guesthouse, which was billed as a “boutique hotel”, was kind of charmingly funky, but “boutique” was not the first word that came to mind.  It could have been any backpacker hangout in Bangkok or Kathmandu, with lots of white kids sitting around eating pancakes.  We made the mistake of eating at their restaurant, which was overpriced and entirely forgettable.  But the staff was very friendly, so we happily settled in.

We went for a long walk around Green Lake Park, just a couple of blocks from the guesthouse.  It’s a lovely place, with weeping willows, bamboo groves , lotuses and water lilies.  Unfortunately, since it was Sunday, half the population of Kunming seemed to be there, and the revelry was deafening.  There were many groups of people dancing, with dueling amplified music.  We decided we would come back when there were fewer people there.

It was an unusually steamy day in Kunming, and our room was very hot when we went to bed.  We left the window open and trained the little electric fan on us.  I fell quickly into REM sleep, and then began having very noisy dreams.  Then a horrendous clanging, banging, crashing crescendo jolted me awake.  “What the...?”  It was half past midnight.  I lay in bed listening to more crashing and banging, along with the idling of a huge truck.  Tom stirred beside me and said, “we need to find a new place to stay tomorrow”.  I suggested at least closing the window,  but Tom had already tried that, and had found that the window frame was swollen so that it could not be closed.  Since sleep was clearly impossible, I went out to see what was going on.  Below us, a stone’s throw from our room, was a huge dump truck, idling noisily.  A front-end loader was roaring back and forth, scraping up and dumping huge loads of construction debris into it.  I went back to bed, put on my noise-cancelling headphones, and read on my ipod until the noise stopped around 1:30.  I guessed they had filled up the truck and driven it off, and I prayed it would not return that night.

Lillia slept through the whole thing.