Day 140 - 19 December 2009: exit China, enter Laos

Stopping at the border to Laos, I am hoping to post some of my cold weather gear home so that I don’t have to carry it around for the rest of the journey. I ask Kevin where a post office is, but by this stage Kevin is not being particularly helpful and just points me down the road. I don’t find it and am feeling quite testy when I get back to the border control still carrying my package.

It turns out the exit from China has gone surprisingly smoothly, with the exception of my absence holding up the queue as we have to go through the control in the order our names are on the group Chinese visa. By now though, I am already feeling a tad peeved and in no mood to take any whinging from anybody. This doesn’t stop Tracy having a go anyway, my response to which leads to her exclaiming ‘don’t talk to me like that’. I tell her not to speak to me at all.

Anyway, we get through the Chinese side much quicker than we are generally used to at exit, although the entry to Laos takes somewhat longer as the truck has to be checked for contraband or whatever it is they think they might find.

At the border, John & Tracy, Pete & Pam and Gaz & Rhiannon separate from us. They have chosen to go to Hanoi and Ha Long Bay in Vietnam as these destinations are not on our itinerary. This means the truck is a bit less crowded and more comfortable for the rest of us.

Into Laos, we are driving on a contoured road through jungle with villages made up of bamboo huts on stilts. We are back in waving country as startled locals great us as we drive by.

When we stop for some food, Laurie takes her ardent localism a bit far.....

Rat Shish Kebab anyone?

hmmm, not too sure either...

Tonight is another bush camp. We have found a compound built specifically for Chinese migrant workers building new roads. They kindly let us camp on the square of the compound. I am on cook group, but it rains and it’s muddy experience. Thankfully the square is also a basketball court, so at least I don’t have to camp on mud.

Day 139 – 18 December 2009: KTV

Today is a drive day again, and I sleep through most of it.

some scenes from the drive...on Laurie's camera

 

We stopped for lunch in a town, parking the truck next to a KTV, i.e. a karaoke bar. Though I haven’t visited a KTV myself, some of the UK to Oz group have. It many of these bars, you don’t get up to sing to whoever is in the bar, but rather a group of you rent a booth or room with its own karaoke machine, and you don’t even have to sing as the exclusively young female staff will sing for you. They will also bring you drinks. And they will keep you entertained in many other ways if you so wish and show them sufficient portraits of Mao.

Although it is lunch time, this KTV’s ladies are already dressed to impress, and they gather outside to giggle and smile at us. Obviously karaoke is popular at all times of day in China.

Tonight we bush camp just off the motorway.

Laurie keeps up her clean run in the now renamed Laurie award. Having spent four years at American universities learning how to forcefully ask stupid questions, I tell her that I will not do her thinking for her. ‘But’, she says, ‘I have lots of philofafel questions’.

Day 138 – 17 December 2009: Yunnan Rock Forest & badminton in heals

The petrified forest is like a smaller scale fragmented and uninhabited Goreme (in Turkey), but it has an exotic other wordly feel to it, as if these were living beings that were suddenly turned to stone. However, my own visit here is a little spoiled by my re-emerging illness, the surprising chill of the morning and the breaking of my second camera of this trip, as I dropped while negotiating my way through a gap in the rocks.

the last photo taken with my second camera of the trick

Later in the day, we make a food and toilet stop in town. Here I see a cage outside of the shop with four cockerels in it, two of which are fighting. I thought that this was a cruel way to keep cockerels, but then realised the shop was restaurant when I see a chef walking out of it with a cleaver.

Bush camping tonight is on a remote dirt track. There is a house down the road from where we are stopped. We are noticed by some residents, and two young women come out onto the road dressed very much as if they are going out to club. However, although they are wearing heals, they start playing badminton in the middle of the road. This attracted some attention from some of our male crew and a few of them take turns chatting to them in their best sign language.

I am still ill and there is a pit toilet across the road from the house which I make use of a few times during the night. The toilets soon bear sign of their being a number of ill people in our group. I also notice while walking to the toilet that the house is a popular overnight truck stop....these would be the lady badminton players’ dates, I am guessing.

‘Numbskull of the Day’ nominations:

1.    1. Me, for dropping my second camera of the trip

2.    2. Chinese sing translators at the rock forest for inventing words such as ‘extinctiveness’

3.    3.  Er, well, Laurie, for ‘I have just found my hat (in her tent), even though I didn’t know it was lost’

4.    4. And the runaway winner is......hmm, Laurie protesting that she is ‘not dumbskull of the day!’

Day 137 – 16 December 2009: I keep myself occupied on another drive day with nominations for 'Numbskull of the Day'

The numbskull of the day award may seem my way of mocking Laurie, as I haven’t awarded it to anybody else yet. She does indeed get her own entry in early today, saying she is getting fed up with my ‘anti-flattery’ comments.

The day starts with a stop at a workshop for the truck, as it has a problem with a broken suspension thingy (spring leaf??).

Many of us descend on a KFC to while away the time, although quite a few people are now ill with bad stomachs.

Coming in with a late entry, Doc Louise says to Kevin that ‘I guess that Kunming is another typical fairly lifeless big city’. Now, not all big cities are interesting or exciting, but I have yet to find one that you could call lifeless. Unless it has just been bombed. To ease the pressure off of Laurie, I award ‘numbskull of the day’ to Louise.

We stop in Kunming for a couple of hours while Kevin gets our Chinese exit papers and our main activity here is to shop at a Walmart to get some food for lunch. I find two types of goats cheese and the total cost of my shop is about ten times the average Chinese restaurant meal. And the cheese is unremarkable to say the least.

We camp outside Kunming at a car park near the Yunnan Rock Forest, which we will visit tomorrow morning. The warmth we started to experience in Lijiang has largely left us, although I suppose I am only complaining because I thought we were done with cold camps. This one is not nearly as bad as we have experienced though as we are at relatively low altitude.

Day 136 – 15 December 2009: new award announced for UK to Oz crew: ‘numbskull of the day’

My belly has settled down a bit and I am no longer leaping to the toilet every five minutes, although I did have a very sleep deprived night. I am still unwell though, and don’t venture out of the hotel, so I don’t see Dali.

Laurie is French, spent her formative years in a French school in Holland, and has spent the past few years at university in the US, so English is not her first language. Discussing linguistics, she tells me that as English is not her first language, she finds it hard to think.

There is a swimming pool at our hotel by the reception, but it has been emptied for the winter with just a puddle of dirty water at the bottom. This is the second day we are in this hotel, but Laurie gets excited when she reads of the presence of a swimming pool in the hotel leaflet. When I point out that she has passed it every time she has come to the room, she objects that that’s just a pool for floating leaves. Not when it’s filled up Laurie.

Added to that, she has accidentally made up yet another new word. Appropriately, this is ‘idioticity’. It’s a triple whammy. She runs away with the recently initiated ‘numbskull of the day’ award. Again.

Laurie shows me pictures of the walk she did today around the walled old town of Dali. It’s impressive looking but would have been more so if I hadn’t spent five weeks in China already.

If I wasn’t ill, I would have been tempted by a boat ride on ‘Eary Lake’, so called because of its shape, but Dali’s attractions are expensive for China. The boat ride would have cost 140 Yuan (c. £14).