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Yunnan Province; China

Mar
2004-09-14 15:37:29

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say a word to us when he gets back in. Aggressively he turns the truck. What a punishment, we must return and drive all the way back? We laugh silently about it, but actually do not want to think of going back all the way and take the ‘slow’ route back again, it’s just before 9 o’clock. Luckily there are more than one illegal entries and exits, and our driver finds one after a few kilometres driving back and continues on the ‘slow’ mountainous road.

Just after dinner (we treated his dinner) we stop at a truck-stop for the night, approximately 180km from where we were picked-up.

To Jinghong

One more day going up and down and we have come to a final conclusion. Although we have not had any rain today, we will take a bus tomorrow to Jinghong, which will cover about 250km of our way south. If we only had reserved some more time we could have taken alternative roads avoiding all the truck exhausts. Just under Kunming we had decided not to choose for the mud road to Pu-er because of the rain and not to choose the mountainous road to be sure we have enough time to get to the border (our visa expires soon).

Raymond is on the roof of a bus again, pulling up the bicycles. The bus ride to Jinghong makes us realise even more how many differences we have seen coming from Kunming going south. The amount of palm trees and other tropical plants have tripled. We spot endless tea-fields, bamboo, coconuts, mango trees, pineapple, bananas and several other fruits (that we don’t recognise) being sold next to the road. We see changes in housing structure, clothes people wear of the several minority groups and the humidity gets higher. We see more poverty in the villages compared to villages just south of Kunming. Yunnan literally means ‘Cloud South’ meaning the province south of the clouds. Taking our trip to Deqin in consideration we wonder where the clouds end.

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