Week 38 - Szechuan Province, China
THE HIGHWAY: continued to beckon to us in Litang, where I last left off. Litang was a stunning little town, but the altitude of 4,000m was just too much - doing up our shoelaces became an Olympic sport; walking down the street a marathon of endurance; sleeping in our beds a cacophony of noise as our hearts beat furiously to keep up with the demand for oxygen. We would have adjusted within a few days, but lacking the time we decided to push on to Kangding.
The ten hour ride thereafter was the worst we have experienced on this trip. It wasn't just that it was dangerous in places (it was) or unspeakably dull in others (it was) but that we sat up the back under the air vent half a foot above our heads, which served the twin functions of giving us something to smash our heads against going over each bump in the road (and the road was pretty much one long bump) while simultaneously spewing clouds of choking dust over us constantly, so that our hair and clothes were thick and crunchy with the stuff after an hour or so. In the morning, with the road blanketed in ice and snow, the driver swerved around clifftops and left Erin staring fixatedly out the window with exactly the same expression on her face that you see on young children watching Bambi when the mother gets shot. In the afternoon, with the roads dry and dusty and the landscape flat and featureless, the driver slowed it down so that we could feel every bump, inhale every dust particle (as well as those tasty tuberculosis particles floating around from the other passengers), and get the maximum amount of enjoyment from the whole thing.
But we made it. In Kangding, a fairly large city squeezed into a deep valley, we met up with a Portuguese-American for a couple of nights of cheap Chinese liquor to defend ourselves from the cold - and oh my, it was cold. Kangding lies at an altitude of 2600m, but it was far, far colder than anywhere we'd been, higher or lower. It was so icy that even wrapped up in all our layers it was only possible to spend about twenty minutes outside.
Strangest thing about Kangding - remember this is a large, completely modern city - is that, walking around one day, it started to snow a tiny bit. This was pretty exciting, as although we'd driven through acres of packed snow, it had never snowed on us before. So we walked around feeling pretty Christmas-y, with tiny flakes falling on our faces, when we started to feel a stickiness under our feets. We looked across the street, where, on a bridge in the middle of the city, was a small herd of goats and yaks. People were picking the ones they wanted for dinner that night. They were being slaughtered and skinned, right there on the street.
We were walking in a flowing stream of goat and yak blood, quickly congealing and freezing under our shoes.
(apparently that was China's way of saying, "Merry fucking Christmas, foreign devils!")
From Kangding we started on the last leg of our journey, on our first proper-sized bus in China, to Chengdu in the northeast of the province. Perhaps it's the results of spending a while at altitude, but Chengdu seems like a perfect city. It's compact and clean, quiet (all the motorbikes are electric), choc-a-bloc with great bars, great food, and friendly people (well, friendly in the standard Chinese pushy-and-rude sort of way). Erin and I came within inches of deciding to stay and work here; in the end it was only our continued memories of working in Bangkok and the promise of an Australian summer that dissuaded us.
Adam left us in a puff of smoke; we spent our last couple of nights getting drunk and silly and then, early Christmas morning, he was gone. Off to Nigeria by way of Bulgaria by way of Hong Kong, Adam was an absolute joy to travel with for the last three months, an ace at keeping the energy levels up and the excitement flowing, and we're going to miss him a helluva lot.
Subsequent to that, Erin and I suffered a harsh lesson in the importance of planning your travels in advance. With Tibet out of the picture we'd planned to waltz across the border to Burma. But from China, permits to Burma cost more than permits to Tibet, so that was out. Vietnam was another option, but two weeks to obtain our visa is two weeks that we can no longer afford, money-wise. So instead we've planned a Great Railway Bazaar, travelling by train from here in Chengdu all the way to Melacca in Malaysia (with a bus interval in Laos, seeing as though that country has precisely 13.5 metres of railway track, all on a bridge in the Mekong, left by the French after their planned Vietnam-China railway fell through).
It's an exciting plan, as it gives us more time in Malaysia - the one country that it felt like we rushed through. We leave today, for a 19-hour journey on the 4:10 to Kunming.
Hope you all have a fantastic new year,
Lachie
THE HIGHWAY: continued to beckon to us in Litang, where I last left off. Litang was a stunning little town, but the altitude of 4,000m was just too much - doing up our shoelaces became an Olympic sport; walking down the street a marathon of endurance; sleeping in our beds a cacophony of noise as our hearts beat furiously to keep up with the demand for oxygen. We would have adjusted within a few days, but lacking the time we decided to push on to Kangding.
The ten hour ride thereafter was the worst we have experienced on this trip. It wasn't just that it was dangerous in places (it was) or unspeakably dull in others (it was) but that we sat up the back under the air vent half a foot above our heads, which served the twin functions of giving us something to smash our heads against going over each bump in the road (and the road was pretty much one long bump) while simultaneously spewing clouds of choking dust over us constantly, so that our hair and clothes were thick and crunchy with the stuff after an hour or so. In the morning, with the road blanketed in ice and snow, the driver swerved around clifftops and left Erin staring fixatedly out the window with exactly the same expression on her face that you see on young children watching Bambi when the mother gets shot. In the afternoon, with the roads dry and dusty and the landscape flat and featureless, the driver slowed it down so that we could feel every bump, inhale every dust particle (as well as those tasty tuberculosis particles floating around from the other passengers), and get the maximum amount of enjoyment from the whole thing.
But we made it. In Kangding, a fairly large city squeezed into a deep valley, we met up with a Portuguese-American for a couple of nights of cheap Chinese liquor to defend ourselves from the cold - and oh my, it was cold. Kangding lies at an altitude of 2600m, but it was far, far colder than anywhere we'd been, higher or lower. It was so icy that even wrapped up in all our layers it was only possible to spend about twenty minutes outside.
Strangest thing about Kangding - remember this is a large, completely modern city - is that, walking around one day, it started to snow a tiny bit. This was pretty exciting, as although we'd driven through acres of packed snow, it had never snowed on us before. So we walked around feeling pretty Christmas-y, with tiny flakes falling on our faces, when we started to feel a stickiness under our feets. We looked across the street, where, on a bridge in the middle of the city, was a small herd of goats and yaks. People were picking the ones they wanted for dinner that night. They were being slaughtered and skinned, right there on the street.
We were walking in a flowing stream of goat and yak blood, quickly congealing and freezing under our shoes.
(apparently that was China's way of saying, "Merry fucking Christmas, foreign devils!")
From Kangding we started on the last leg of our journey, on our first proper-sized bus in China, to Chengdu in the northeast of the province. Perhaps it's the results of spending a while at altitude, but Chengdu seems like a perfect city. It's compact and clean, quiet (all the motorbikes are electric), choc-a-bloc with great bars, great food, and friendly people (well, friendly in the standard Chinese pushy-and-rude sort of way). Erin and I came within inches of deciding to stay and work here; in the end it was only our continued memories of working in Bangkok and the promise of an Australian summer that dissuaded us.
Adam left us in a puff of smoke; we spent our last couple of nights getting drunk and silly and then, early Christmas morning, he was gone. Off to Nigeria by way of Bulgaria by way of Hong Kong, Adam was an absolute joy to travel with for the last three months, an ace at keeping the energy levels up and the excitement flowing, and we're going to miss him a helluva lot.
Subsequent to that, Erin and I suffered a harsh lesson in the importance of planning your travels in advance. With Tibet out of the picture we'd planned to waltz across the border to Burma. But from China, permits to Burma cost more than permits to Tibet, so that was out. Vietnam was another option, but two weeks to obtain our visa is two weeks that we can no longer afford, money-wise. So instead we've planned a Great Railway Bazaar, travelling by train from here in Chengdu all the way to Melacca in Malaysia (with a bus interval in Laos, seeing as though that country has precisely 13.5 metres of railway track, all on a bridge in the Mekong, left by the French after their planned Vietnam-China railway fell through).
It's an exciting plan, as it gives us more time in Malaysia - the one country that it felt like we rushed through. We leave today, for a 19-hour journey on the 4:10 to Kunming.
Hope you all have a fantastic new year,
Lachie
