Lijiang and our last few days in China

Lijiang lies three hours away from Dali, on a bus that crosses small mountains covered in green paddy fields and ancient villages. The city is big and uninteresting but it houses a charming old town, with its maze of small paved alleyways, well preserved buildings and tiny canals where (to Pete's delight and fascination) goldfish swim in schools of hundreds. From everywhere you get great views of the snowy peaks that lie nearby, and we had a few pleasant days wandering around sunny Lijiang, although we appreciated the roaring stove at the hostel, as it was sunny but quite cool (which probably sounds like a joke to you people from more northern climes... it was cold for southern China, that is to say about 10 degrees C)
After another 8 hour bus trip to Kunming, with free meal stop (apparently a must of any Chinese bus journey), we booked two tickets on the sleeper bus to the Vietnamese border for the next day, and spent our last night and day in Kunming before embarking on this memorable trip.
It didn't get off to a good start : when we managed to find the coach amongst the dozens which drive in and out of Kunming long distance bus station all the time, a very aggressive character explaines to us as soon as we had given our tickets in that the price of petrol being high we would have to pay 30 yuan per person on top of the ticket price (that was about a quarter of the value of the ticket). There was a French couple with us at the time amd we tried to argue that no other Chinese bus asked us for anything like that, that surely the price of the petrol would be included in the ticket price, and that it wasn't fait that none of the Chinese travellers had to pay, but he had an answer for everything. According to him the Chinese passengers had already paid, and in any case if weren't happy we could always take the bus tomorrow, as he wouldn't let us on this one. So we ended up reluctantly giving him the last of our yens plus some dollars to make the total, and we stepped aboard the bus rather infuriated. Later an English couple came on and they got told the same story, but they just got on and refused to pay, until the guy gave up and the bus left (he was staying behind, which we hadn't realised, we thought he was the driver...). Good on them! So a nice lesson in how to get ripped off, which hopefully we won't let happen again. A sleeper bus in China is a rather extraordinary thing : the coach has three rows of bunks running through its length, with two big 5-sleeper bunks at the back. They get shared by travellers who don't necessarily know each other, men and women. Of course it smells of sweaty feet, cigarette smoke, unwashed laundry (including the duvets you get supplied with) and food. There are no curtains so if you want to sleep you have to block out the light (easily done with a scarf over the eyes), the noise from people talking, mobile phones ringing (they did so throughout the night), and from a baby crying in the bunk it is sharing with its mum (for that you can rely on earplugs). But the hardest thing to ignore are the shudders and jolts of the bus as it hiccups during 14 hours over the 400km of stony dirt track that lie between Kunming and Hekou, the border town. I managed to drop off to sleep once and i was awoken brutally by a rough patch on the road, dreaming that i was in a plane crash and that the shaking was due to the accident...! The bus regularly stops in the middle of nowhere to let people off (another recurrent feature of Chinese buses), for a loo break, once it was for a random passport check (only half the passengers were checked), then we stopped for about an hour while the driver waited for a digger to stop working on the portion of road he needed to drive through... When the sun rised we were in the jungle, driving alongside banana plantations. We got to Hekou around 9:30 am, and after a very smooth border crossing (Chinese checks, then a short walk over a bridge, Vietnamese checks, and you are in... it took about 20 minutes in total) we are now on Vietnamese soil.
As we have now left China i ought to share a few thoughts with you about this amazing country.
A typical trait for Chinese people seems to be impatience. It appears in many different ways, for example on the street, when buses, cars, cyclists and pedestrian all criss-cross dangerously in order to reach their destination using the shortest and most direct route possible. In queues as well, one second of inattention and you lose you space, and there is always someone waving a bunch of notes who ignores the line and walks straight to the desk, pestering the attendnat until they sell them their ticket. Pete also told me of a scene he witnessed in the men's loos : there was a queue of 2 or 3 waiting for the urinals, but an impatient user decided it was better to wee on the floor than to have to wait...
Which brings me onto the subject of public loos, which i have made a point avoiding until know, but I feel i just have to let you know (if you are of a sensitive nature, please skip this paragraph). Noone can say they know what a stinky toilet is until they have been to China. Dirty is an understatement. The stench that emanates from them is usually close to unbearable, of course they are squat toilets which is fine if they weren't always blocked. Old ladies don't usually feel the need to close the door and are quite happy crouching in front of everyone, but in some cases the door just isn't available anyway, and the last few we visited were just troth dug in the ground with a few metre-high partition walls, with no flush and no doors....delightful! So all ther is left to do is to forget about your modesty and pinch your nose. However Chinese women seem to find this perfectly acceptable and they just carry on their conversations from one cubicle to another...
One last thing about China : everything is quite cheap, but nothing is free. Everywhere you go, be it to visit a park, a temple, a museum, a mountain, or even public loos, you have to pay an entry fee! Yes, for the fragrant latter as well!
I feel i have been quite harsh with China and i would like to apologise. Please don't be talked out of visiting this wonderful country which is beautiful, massive, diverse and friendly. Just one word of advice : use the hotel loos!