China the second

[alaron03]

OK so fifteen minutes more of China while I wait for a time point. Let's see, we left off as our intrepid explorers had just escaped disneyland China...Acctually a quick note on the kind of trouble that not speaking the language gets you into. On the way out of lijiang we gave ourselves two hours beofre the flight, and went to go hop into a taxi. We showed him our little book that said airport and he nodded so we hopped in. He started going and took us to the bus station, we said...no, no, and pointed to the airport again. He looked confused and pointed to the bus, then he mimed eating, menawhile we are helplessly miming flying. It becomes clear that he does not want to take us to the airport, so we get out and he (very nicely)does not require that we pay him. The next Taxi stops...well by now we have understood that the airport is some distance, and indeed the book mentions it being 25km away. Great, so we negotiate a price before we get in (and by negotiate I mean suggesting a price which the taxi driver thiniks is fine guarenteeing that he is getting a good deal, but we don't have all day and it is about $15 so this is fine.) Again, much of this has happened with pointing at the book and the miming of flying, so neither of us are real sure that this guy a)understands he is taking us to the airport (although I am fairly sure of this) b) knows where the airport is, cause he looks preatty hesitant about the whole thing. Really I am not sure this guy had ever driven to the airport before. As we are pulling away we realise that the first guy was probably trying to take us to the bus that went to the airport. A fine notion except we have no idea how often it goes and were kind of not prepared for the bus ride having not planned on 25km od driving. (I know if we had any sense we would have checked the book on this, but Lijiang was so clearly tourist orriented it seemed like it should have a fairly major and accessable airport. IT kind of does, it is just that Chinse tourists go on tours so thier tour busses take them to and from things like the airport. Oh well. Anyway, we spent the next half hour or so in a state of somewhat uncomfortable anxiety worrying that if somehow we had gotten screwed up and were going to the wrong place we would not have time to correct it. This is one of the problems with having a hive brain with your traveling companion because you often feed off of each others emotions and when the emotions are good that is great, but when you are both worried it tends to cycle the worry up rather then down. In this way my mom and dad acctually have hte advantage cause they tend to worry about different things. Aurana and I are just a little too alike on the worry scale.
Anyway after a tense, but uneventful drive out into the middle of nowhere we ended up at the airport without insident and Aurana's responce was "I yold you it would be fine" but my spider sense was tingling so I know she was worried too :)