the kunming bus station. round one.

our first of what will probably be many trips through the kunming bus station. our first sleeper bus in china, not sure what to expect. after inquiring inside the station, we make our way to the parking lot and to our supposed bus. we are quickly surrounded by a few men, asking 'where we are going?', 'can i see your tickets?' a man grabs our tickets out of my hand, looks at it and he says 'come with me, this is not your bus'. i quickly follow the man who is walking away from our bus towards another bus. i immediately ask him for our tickets back and he complies and points to another bus and said that is our bus. i look at the front window and it does say it is going to lijiang.

after a relatively hassle free process with boarding buses and trains throughout japan and china up to this point, we are not quite sure what to make of the situation unfolding before us. what transpires next is a 30 minute 'encounter' with this man. he works at the bus station, 'claims' to be a manager (flashes you a laminate he wears around his neck) and because he can speak good english (and apparently his french isn't so bad either), he abuses his position by intimidating foreigners into paying him money for their 'excess' baggage. it was obvious to us right from the beginning that he was not doing this in an official capacity, but for his own personal gain. he lifted my big pack up and said it was about 12kg and that it was over the 10kg free allowance (pointing to chinese text on the back of the ticket) and expressing that i would have to pay him a little bit of 'chinese money' for the extra baggage...for the gas. if he was really doing this legitimately, he would have known that my bag was well over 20kg!! i didn't really take him seriously. he was kind of amusing and i put up with him. anyways, we manage to stuff our big packs in the under storage and he proceeds to board us on the bus and directs us to beds at the back of the bus, 'thats where all the foreigners sleep'. clearly, they are not our beds as we had our own beds # 9 and 11 somewhere nearer to the front. the bus driver is nowhere to be seen at this point, its late and i just want to get going. we squeeze ourselves through the already full bus, justin (also a foreigner, who we had just met inside the station) with us, to the back of the bus to the upper bunks. a flat bed across the entire width of the bus to sleep 5 passengers, 2 people already there, there is room for 3 more, aren't we lucky! we aren't really given any options at this point. now nicely cornered in our beds, shoes off, he asks for a little 'chinese money' for the bags, i offer him 2 yuan (about 36 cents canadian), as a joke, hoping it will get rid of him. it doesn't and i don't think he found it funny either. he says it'll be about 120 yuan, we laugh at him (our tickets for the bus were only 152 yuan each). after much debating and arguing back and forth, his frustration begins to show and at this point laurel suggests we get off the bus and get our money back for our tickets. that infuriates him some more and he starts to swear "fuck, fuck, fuck this, fuck that" etc, etc, etc. another lame attempt at an intimidation tactic. oh no, he can swear, i better give him all our money. haha. after more debating, and me not wanting to be left in kunming that night, his annoying persistence works and i finally give him 30 yuan, hoping to shut him up and get rid of him. i tell him that is all i have (a lie). thats not enough for him, he now asks for our foreign money, says he'll take any foreign money we have. we say we have none (another lie). he saw that i had some more money in my little change pouch and asked what was in there. i said its our last 10 yuan that i need to keep for our taxi when we arrive in lijiang (another lie!). he asks for it in a last ditch effort to squeeze a little bit more from us. i give it to him in frustration and finally he concedes that, that is all he is going to get from us. then, he actually has the nerve to write us an unreadable receipt for the amount we paid for the excess baggage. 40 yuan is only worth about $7.00 CAD, but still it is the principle of the matter that was frustrating. the bus driver did eventually show up, but did nothing, except to show his frustration with this man for holding up the bus, which was now quite late in departing.

we knew we shouldn't have paid him anything and after some thought into this event, we had figured out had happened. there are 2 sleeper buses to lijiang from kunming, one at 8:30pm and one at 9:00pm (ours), we had arrived just prior to 8:30 and figured that it was the 8:30pm bus he crammed us on and not the 9:00pm one which was probably still empty when we boarded the other bus. after much discussion with others who have had encounters or heard experiences about this man, we found out that he had taken 400 yuan from one couple, 100 yuan from another couple and on another occasion, a passenger was punched, but we're not sure if there might be two different people at the station harassing foreigners. on a more positive note, we recently did hear that he was actually arrested. i'm sure he's back at his job now, doing the same thing, but hopefully not.