While planning my RTW trip just over a year ago, I hoped to spend two weeks in China with my closest friends who would be there on vacation. Their plans ended up shifting, but I stop in China anyway — for a mere 24 hours on my way from Japan to Nepal.
I spend lots of time tracking flights to Kathmandu and everything is so expensive; the cheapest I can find is around $800. So I keep looking. And a few days before my departure I find a ticket for $565 — the only catch is there are two layovers in China, the first in Shanghai and the second in Kunming (overnight). Here’s a glance at this itinerary:
This journey totals 29 hours including all flights and layovers. And it’s exactly 23 hours from my first arrival to second departure in China, which means I narrowly squeak by without having to get a visa (most airports here allow a maximum of 24 hours in the country for transit passengers).
For the record, Shanghai and Beijing airports now allow a free 72 hour transit visa so that passengers on long layovers in these cities can leave the airport and see local attractions before their connecting flight departs. (There is some controversy brewing that this is a security weakness in the wake of last month’s disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which was Beijing-bound — the two passengers with stolen passports would have more easily escaped attention by using the 72 hour visa than a longer one coordinated in advance, as the 72 hour visas are checked by airline gate agents instead of an embassy official.)
Since my Shanghai / Pu Dong layover is only a few hours, I stay in the airport. And I witness this glorious sunset:
A shot from my Instagram feed:
About three hours later we land in Kunming. While Kunming does not have a 72 hour transit visa, it does have the standard 24 hour visa like most other Chinese airports. My layover here is 13 hours so I leave with new friends I met on the flight to share a motel room several miles from the airport — a much-appreciated improvement over my original plan of sleeping on a bench in the arrivals terminal. All of us are on the same flight to Nepal the next morning.
After a good night’s sleep and morning coffee (but no internet), we board the final leg of the trip to Nepal.
Here are my two new friends, Gunga and Binod — they live in Japan and are visiting her family in Nepal. We land in Kathmandu on Dasai, a major holiday similar to Christmas, and Gunga can’t wait to see her mother and sisters.
It seems silly to include an expense report for China since I’m here for a single day, but I’m nothing if not thorough.
At the Kunming airport I withdrew about $30 USD from an ATM to buy food and – the next morning – coffee for my new friends who generously allowed me to crash in their motel room the night before.
May my next visit to China be much longer and involve the Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors!
