Lincang Airport

Lincang airport is smaller than the Portland Jetport, or to put it in prospective it had one gate, one runway, and one baggage carrolsel. Around noon the taxi pulled up to the gate a woman stood in the way and told the taxi to pull over. I got out and walked up to the woman. Behind her was the parkinglot and then the airport itself. Thirty-foot flames licked into the air just in front of the building. It seemed to be a car on fire, I couldn't tell.

"Accident?" I asked.
"Yes," the woman guarding the gate answered.

I looked back at the taxi driver who was standing by his car. He pointed at his car and said something in Mandarin along the lines of: "Dude, it doesn't look good, let's go back to town." I paid him, grab my bags, and went over to the woman by the gate.

Police and airport security were running around, sweating profusely. They put up some police tape around the parking lot, kicked out everyone they could, then slamed the gate shut. For the next ten minutes the fire grew larger and larger until at last they started dumping water on whatever was burning.

I sat outside the gate for the next three hours on the pavement. People came and left, but one Chinese guy sat next to me almost the whole time. I worried the airport wouldn't open until tomorrow. The Chinese guy assured me it would open at 3:30 (just 3 hours after the fire,) and as he promised, it did.

We walked right in, police stood outside, calm now, and with looks of relief. I tried about asking what happened, and I got one of two answers: "Impossible," or "I don't know." We walked in through the parkinglot, I stuck next to my new friend even though I could barely communicate with him (just one or two words at a time,) and he decided to walk right over where the fire happened.

Nobody seemed to care that we were walking over the incident spot. I remember walking over the charred pavement, it smelled like a campfire. A man with a broom, a cart, and a hose, swept up and washed away the last ashes of what happened. Every seemed to pretend nothing happened, and after a while, it really felt like nothing happened.

The only after affect was my 5:50 flight was delayed an hour. I spent the entire time waiting at a tea stand with my new friend. The girl serving the tea gave my friend her phone number, I guess I became his wing man. We drank six or seven pots of green tea, I peed like three times, and was never charged a dime even though I tried to pay several times. We boarded the plane and went out ways. My friend headed to Gongdong and I was off to Shanghai.