Day 132 – 11 December 2009: Big John stages a sit in, Pete ballistic again...Lu books us into a four star hotel

Having slept on top of the truck again due to having nowhere to pitch a tent, I am damp as I awake. We still have a long drive in front of us on more mountain roads. Tiger Leaping Gorge is indeed closed, and so we are going to try to get to Lijiang today, the old town of which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back 800 years.

For lunch, we stop at a roadside restaurant in the middle of nowhere halfway up a mountain. Our guide Kevin orders the food for us, but asks the four tables of us to group into three. General confusion reigns as nobody can decide which three of the four should be occupied. In the end, most people just stay where they are. This not aided by some stragglers who were not part of the headcount Kevin took when ordering the food. Pete asks Kevin to order for the fourth table, but Kevin is getting a bit testy and refuses to, telling him to move to another table. Not entirely unpredictably, Pete starts swearing vociferously at Kevin and then stamps out with his wife Pam (another scouse retired school head). When a guide is compulsorily enforced upon you by the government as part of your entry restrictions, it means that the customer is not always right.

Meanwhile, big John, who is on the table that Pete and Pam were on, decides to stage a sit-in strike until he is served some food. By this time, all the other tables have finished their food and the group is ready to go, but John is not budging. Some people start getting angry at him for holding us up. I decide I can’t be bothered to join in with all the hoo-ha and I just sit down with John and have a beer with him until he calms down. However, though we do get going eventually, John never does get lunch, and we don’t get to Lijiang. And Pete gets warned that if he calls Kevin a w**ker again, he’ll get kicked off the truck.

We eventually stop at a town about 120 km from Lijiang. Lucinda is well aware that everyone is pretty fed up at this point, so she books us into a four star hotel, which definitely not in the UK to Oz budget. The hotel is clearly a relatively well to do business hotel, although it doesn’t have internet. As we check in, our unkempt, unwashed and weather beaten group stand out like rhino droppings on a golf green compared to the other hotel guests.