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”.

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.