Alrighs, continuing my day to day documentation of the Yunnan trip.

Day 2

Well, we did sleep very well and early the night before, and we had our wake up call at 3am, or should I say I woke up at 3am, think that the real wake up call is 3.30am. Nevertheless, I'm a logger, and need to be ready to move their luggage so I got ready earlier.

Actually I hatched this wicked plan to have a prank morning call, but it all failed because I came up with the plan too late, after the real morning call is issued. My plan is to call up some other room, tell them that it's their morning call, and the time now is 5am. It's not exactly the best plans I have, but well, it's a start.

Without much hassle, we managed to go to the airport and we even reached before the check-in counters are open. So, no choice, we waited, and then checked-in, boarded the plane which is to depart from Kunming at 7.20am.

Destination- the REAL Shangri-la. It's an area called DiQing. It's altitude is 3539m knocked the air out of me once I came out of the plane. Not mentioning that it's a freezing -9 degrees centigrade, the oxygen in the air is also significantly thinner than in Kunming. With me carrying a big box of logistics, the roughly 150m walk in the open air to the indoor area of the airport seemed like a 1.6km run, when I reached, I didn't sweat, but was panting already with my heart thumping. Now, that makes me quite disappointed with my own fitness level.

Logistics moved the luggage to the pickup once again, and this time, using the trolleys. Well, the bars of the trolley is freezing cold too, due to the outdoor temperature, and I resulted to wearing gloves to even push the trolley. We got our job done nonetheless, and went to my bus, and headed to the hotel.

Well, once we reached the hotel, the log comm decided to have a gathering to encourage each other, playing for a while and having some snacks and chocolates courtesy of GekSwee. Following, we rested, and I slept, preparing to climb up the stairs of the Illama temple, which PeiChey and Angie say got 100 steps up to the temple. With the thin oxygen, it's not exactly our idea of a walk in the park. Anyway, disappointment again when we found out that the bus drove us straight up to the temple.

Before our trip to the temple, we had our lunch actually. And it's the best lunch we had!! It's so good that one of the dishes became our regular dish for most of our meals to come in the following days!! Ok, back to the journey.

Upon arrival at the temple, I could still remember XinYun, who was sleeping. When we told her that we reached already, she blurly replied, "Huh? Where are we going?" The whole bus paused for a moment to register what she had just said. That moment of silence is really incredible. Laughable, a blue mountain goat. Anyway, without the climbing of the stairs, we walked around the temple itself, and inside it. Well, what can I say, it's a nice religious place where I actually prayed for peace in my family.

When we headed back, the bus trip is still as normal as before. Also, blur XinYun was blur and bluffed again. This time, I initiated the trick, saying, "Hey XinYun, wake up already, we reached the Illama temple le." Her reaction was similar to the previous one, and she said, "Huh? I thought we went there already?" Of course we had. It took her 10 seconds to register the thought that we had been there and back, and is now parked outside the hotel.

Immediately after that, we had a shopping trip. I bought more chocolate, and a compass bargained down to RMB5. Nothing much really, since we just went to a convenient store and bought some food, and that's it. Well, after the trip, some of the log comm members met in a room for some light discussions, and rested and waited for what we hoped to be a good steamboat dinner.

And it's quite a bad steamboat dinner actually. The hosts for the dinner sang songs with pitch so high that they can beat KaiTing hands down, and several people couldn't take it and cupped their ears trying to block out the noise. Apart from that, our return performance is not very good too, yeah, Bryan, ChenDi, Leonard and ZhongRu went on stage to sing, and practically, Bryan's voice is the loudest since it's nearest to the mic, but it isn't exactly in tune, well, it's a return performance nonetheless. Food wise, it isn't that bad, but we still eat quite little due to us, since we're not very adaptable creatures when it comes to taste.

Following, we had our debrief, and prepare for the main day of the whole trip, Day 3, where we visited SiZhong(4th Junior High school), the place where we shared the most laughter tears and joy.