One type of comedic play and film involves a series of misfortunes befalling the protagonist, often in such absurd succession that it forces the audience into uncontrollable laughter. Audiences can laugh because they're safely ensconced in their seats, but it is another matter when such absurd situations happen in real life – as happened on my trip to southwest China's Yunnan Province in the summer of 2002.

Living in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, I'd heard other expats' exotic stories about Guangxi's neighbor Yunnan, particularly Dali, and with Guilin's suffocating heat and humidity bearing down, my boyfriend at the time and I decided to pay this fabled town a visit.

Situated in the mountains of northwestern Yunnan, Dali is famed for natural beauty that leaves one wondering if its nominal similarity to the Spanish surrealist painter might be more than a coincidence. The dark green, fog-capped mountains, the old-fashioned architecture and cultural diversity of the place have long made it popular with Western backpackers, and increasingly, many Chinese have flocked to live there to escape the big cities.

We went cheap and bought hard-seat tickets, which are padded, but at night force one to lie in whatever position results in the least-intense backache after hours of futile attempts to sleep. But by morning, we were rolling through verdant mountains, sometimes so high up that the villages below looked like ant colonies. A little physical discomfort seemed a small price to pay.

Upon our arrival in Kunming, we boarded the nearest bus to Dali, and I found my Chinese boyfriend to be of great help, given my still-infantile Mandarin proficiency at the time. Within 20 minutes, we were driving at what felt like 80 kilometers per hour on a narrow, single-lane highway carved into a mountain, a wall on one side and a cliff on the other, passing cars on blind corners as our driver shouted things in the local dialect even my boyfriend couldn't understand.

I'm happy to report that a few hours later, we arrived in Dali rather than the morgue. We headed straight for the nearest Bank of China ATM to get some cash for lunch. I inserted my card, entered my PIN, selected the amount to withdraw, and waited. After a moment, the machine spat my card out and gave me an error message. I tried again several times with the same result.

Inside, the teller explained that mine was a limited-use card, so while I'd used it without any problems in Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong Province earlier that year, I couldn't use it in Yunnan.

With our cash running out, we had to sell my camera. Because analog cameras were still common then, we got 300 yuan ($36). That allowed us to stay at a seedy hostel, get a bus the next morning back to Kunming, and from there, a train, but only as far as Nanning, some 400 km away from my residence in Guilin. We left Dali the next morning and boarded the train that night as a storm was rolling through the province.

Because the storm had knocked out a section of catenary, the train stopped in Middle-of-Nowhere, Yunnan, losing power and air conditioning for hours before we started moving again, finally arriving in Nanning late at night, only to find the Bank of China ATM network was down, forcing us to spend the night in a park and wait until the bank opened the next morning, unable to sleep for fear of robbery.

That was the last straw. I spent about half an hour ranting like a lunatic about the inconvenience of the situation, even as my boyfriend tried in vain to calm me down for a well-founded fear of drawing unwanted attention. Eventually, I ran out of power like an overused mobile phone and found myself coming close to falling asleep while standing.

Traveling in China back then – and given the pace of the country's development, I see nothing odd about referring to 2002 as "back then" – was a more complicated thing than today. But if anything, the experience taught me the value of preparation almost to the point of paranoia and not leaving anything to chance. Consequently, my next trip to Yunnan two years later was a much more pleasant experience.

The author is an American used to live in China