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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.               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”. |
The China Connection..
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On the rest day in Laos I gave Penny the love and attention that I had promised her before the rest of the group arrived to join us following their car collection in Bangkok on Monday. In the afternoon I went for a walk around town and discovered that boys will be boys the world over. There where 4 boys on the rail of the bridge jumping the 8 metres into the flooded creek along with trying to push a very unwilling friend off the bridge. The creek was raging with dirty flood water and the boys would jump in to the spaces between the flood debris. Not even my cup of tea when I was young and pretty silly about 40 years ago. The first dinner together was at the Laung Namtha Night Market where you can get all sort of great food and some dishes most of us didn’t really take to; like the eggs that were nearly ready to hatch and then cooked as a meal or the kebab sticks of chicken feet. Most of us ate the roast duck and pork with fried rice or noodles. As we parted for the night we agreed to meet in the morning for a 7.30 departure to arrive at the Chinese border when it opened at 8.30 to get through early and have all our car and licence paperwork completed on Friday before the police knocked off for the weekend. At 4.00am I woke with the realisation the China border was one hour ahead of us. That was the end of my sleep. I was to scared to go to sleep in case I over-slept. At 5.30am I texted Ross that we had to leave by 6.30 and he got everyone organised so we all ended up at the border to meet our guide in time. Mr Alim was waiting for us and will be taking care of us till we depart Western China on about the 13th of September. The border crossing followed by the drive up to Mengula to get our Chinese number plates, driving licences and safety instruction, all went off like clockwork and we were back on the road at 12.30 on route to Jinghong for the night stop where some of us purchased SIM cards for our IPads. The drive from the Border up to Jinghong was through fantastic mountains covered with rubber plantations with the trees just starting to produce rubber. The night finished with a welcome banquet put on by Alim and Silk Road Adventures. It a bit of a struggle working on the blog in China so this will all be sent home to Julie who will construct the page and publish it for me. Thank you very much Honey for all the help you have given me with construction, maintenance and ongoing guidance with grammar and spelling.
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The Vauxhall Gods Smiled on Us
Today started with a border crossing which wasn’t as smooth as hoped. Somehow when we picked up the car from the port we were given the customs paperwork but not the “Importance of Conveyance” form from the police. After a lot of decision they decided to give us one as we where leaving and sign it off straight away so we could exit Thailand. I think it help that our car was a great photo subject for all the officers to get photographed with.
About 120k after leaving the border we were coming down a hill in 2nd gear and I couldn’t change out of 2nd. OMG! what has gone wrong was my first reaction! We drove along in 2nd till we found space to pull over and investigate. Upon lifting the floor to get at the gearbox we discovered the lid latch had come apart and fallen into the gearbox(Vauxhall owners will understand). Luckily this latch had not got caught up in the gear train and the only damage was a bit of wear on the thread. With a great deal of help from the Vauxhall Gods no serious damage was done and the parts from the outside of the gearbox we couldn’t do without were found laying of the top of the box at the back. So all in all a very lucky escape from a potential trip ender. Maurie and I proceeded to clean the thread up with a file and get the whole contraption back to gather again. After this was completed it was time to have cuppa in the shelter that was beside the road that served as some were dry to put our luggage while getting parts from the bottom of the car.
As we were loading the car a group of young Loas kids pulled up to have a look and ask us where we were going. Lee spoke very good english that had been learnt at school.
The day finished up with us arriving in Luang Namtha for 2 night till the others join us and we all cross into China on friday. We will spend the day getting washing done and giving Penny some tender loving care with the grease gun and oil can.
The Mighty Mekong.
This afternoon we received news that the other 4 cars are unloaded and are now on the way north to catch up with us tomorrow night in Luang Namtha in Laos.
Today has been a short drive to spend the night beside the Mekong River that forms the Thai-Laos border in this area. As it’s the wet season the river is running full, fast and a Red Brown colour with thousands on tonnes of slit from all the farms and hills in the area upstream.
We left Chiang Rai latish as we only had 160ks driving after doing some bloging and a bit of tinkering on Penny. Our first stop was a local market to check the shopping habits of the Thai people. the market had everything in local fruit and meat including plenty of live fish. In the last couple of days we have seen a lot of signs to caves so today we visited a cave site to only go about 10 metres inside. Caves are used as houses by the local monkey family so we left and moved on to Mae Sai for lunch on the Mekong river upstream from our crossing point Tomorrow.
While lunching in Mae Sai it started to rain, the funniest site around is people riding their scooters with umbrellas up. We moseyed on from lunch to stop and watch some men harvesting rice plants for transfer to another paddy, before the last stop for the day at the Opium Museum which displayed the story of Opium from 5000 years ago up to now.
