Uphill around a corner…downhill around a corner

Uphill around a corner, downhill around a corner.

At 11.00am yesterday this post was to be called “All the tea in China” as we had left our overnight stay and the rubber plantations that we had driven through for the last day in Laos and our first day in China had changed to mountain sides of tea.

The first 4 hours of yesterday was north along a very good freeway, which we had to turn off at a certain town. Somewhere in being told the name of the town we had to leave the freeway at, and getting to the right town it slipped my mind in the translation; however I did know where we were to finish for the night.

At lunch I look at my map and GPS and decided on a route that we would take. This turned out to both good and bad. Good because it was a fantastic adventure and drive; and bad because we selected a road that had 80 ks of roadworks. LOL. That 80k took 4 hours as we were dodging all the machinery and the people working as they do most of the work by hand. We also had to stop for 45 mins while they cleared the road from a cutting on the side of the mountain that work was happening on.

All the time we spent stopped was spent surrounded by locals who only two for the afternoon could speak English. For the 80km the roadworks we were climbing up and down three 800 metered high mountain ranges. The freeway drive in the morning we had crossed I think about 5 ranges all of a similar height.

The last 40ks drive in to Yuanyang to visit the ancient rice terraces dating back thousands of years, was one of the drives that I will never forget as we came over the top of this hill at 1980 metres elevation and the valley floor was 1600 metres below us and 35kms away down this most awesome drive.

As we drove down I was concentrating on the road and traffic and not looking out, then Maurie said “glance over the edge and see how steep that is”. BAD move on my part as I was driving the right side of the road with my side the outside, as I looked over I had a wave of “OMG”, as no uphill traffic was coming I snuck down the wrong side of the road for a bit till I got my head sorted. That drop off the edge was probably the longest drop I have driven beside!!!!! I didn’t even get photo as it was getting late in the day and nearly dark with no time to stop.

The Farming report in brief for the day. We would pass through a valley with nearly everyone growing the same thing then the next valley would be a different mix of their same crops. The one thing in common was that the land has to be absolutely vertical to stop some one farming it!!!

This blog post has no photos sorry as time this morning is short, I’ll get that corrected in the next 24 hours as time permits.

At the road block
At the road block
Buying pineapples for lunch
Buying pineapples for lunch
Closed road
Closed road
Keeping the freeway clean
Keeping the freeway clean
Lotus plants
Lotus plants
Miles of this make it slow
Miles of this make it slow
More hold ups
More hold ups
Rugged country
Rugged country
Tea plantations
Tea plantations
Tea
Tea
Traffic controller
Traffic controller
Waiting for trucks to get through
Waiting for trucks to get through
Water buffalo
Water buffalo
We came up that on the other side of the vally
We came up that on the other side of the valley

To sum up the day a great 563 kilometres were on both the freeways and country roads it was all either “Uphill around a corner, downhill around a corner”.

One Comment

  1. Norton Hawes

    Just catching up on your trip, from the words and photos it looks amazing so far.
    Good luck with the rest of the trip.
    Norton and Adele

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