Motorcycle trip across western Sichuan and NW Yunnan

We are back and done with the trip.

Photos here

enjoy

DAY TWENTYONE

Walked around town, casey got a tibetian jacket made. Parked the bikes at a friends house and chatted in the afternoon. On the 12h sleeper bus back to kunming now. Afterwards casey is going hiking with a college friend and I am off to Hong Kong for a few weeks.

 

DAY TWENTY

40 km. Short ride in the grass land ended even shorter when a local guy got a nasty cut on his ankle. 3hours and 25 stitches later and it was dark.

DAY NINETEEN

0km. Lazy day Internet repairs and a movie projected on the white side of an unsuspecting Tibetian house. Looks like the journey will end here. Got a couple day rides and repairs lined up and an over night bus to Kunming at the end of the week.

DAY EIGHTEEN

200km? 7hours. 3 flat tires and 1 leaky valve stem. Nice road in parts... Petty rocky peaks. Back in Shangri-la now for a few days including some more repairs.

DAY SEVENTEEN

240km 7hours. Flat tire. Beautiful road again... over a pass and into an amazing canyon. Neat white rammed earth houses. Saw some quail with babies. In Xiang Cheng(乡城) now 2-300km from Shangrila.

DAY SIXTEEN

230km? 7hours. Another broken bolt, a large piece of plastic including the tail light and turn signals fell off, and the 3 day old clutch cable broke. Very beautiful ride again. High mountains pine forest and alpine meadows makes me wish we had a tent and were hiking. Back in Li Tang now maybe for a few days. This is turning into more of a learn how to fix Zong Shen motorcycles with no parts class or watch your motorcycle fall apart while you ride it nightmare rather than a journey through the Tibetian highlands of Si Chuan and Yun Nan trip. What will break tomorrow? Bets are open. Saw marmot and pica like creatures today... not sure what they were because I didn't know China had either. Had amazing Tibetian dumplings and soup tonight, stuffed ourselves for less than Chinese food would have cost.

DAY FIFTEEN

200km? 7hours.Two broken bolts, cracked frame and oil leak. All fixed this afternoon except the oil leak. In La Ri Ma township(拉日马乡) best riding yet heat dirt road no cars, beautiful country. Made a spectacle in town just by being here. Huge circles gathered around us every time we stopped walking. A 40 year old dude spoke some of his foreign language with us... sounded like a bunch of t's a's and k's. Went up on a grassy hill and took some glamour shots with three much too happy guys. Got to try riding up a creek for the first time and got pretty wet.

DAY FOURTEEN

180km? 50hours. In Lu Huo(炉霍) tonight. Bad road deep deep  dust lots of trucks. Still beautiful and Tibetan... Getting drier and less steep. Tomorrow will try and find an alternative route away from the highway and over a mountain on a dirt road for 150km. Got stopped by the police at gun point... Three young guys... one with a machine gun and two with assault shotguns. We played dumb as normal and the finally produced the word passport. Their camera wouldn't work to take pictures of our passports and they told us the road was dangerous and let us go.

DAY THIRTEEN

100km? 3hours. Went in this morning to get Casey's visa and waited until 4 to pick it up. The road out of Kang Ding was under construction for the first 40 all one lane big trucks and dust to block the sun. Back in Ta Gong tonight. Heading north tomorrow.

DAY TWELVE

0 km.  All day spent in Kangding. Found the visa extension office, but are waiting for tomorrow to extend casey's visa. Spent several hours fixing things broken by the last mechanic. Found out both the speedometer/odeometer pickups are broken probably means no repairs until i can get replacements back in kunming. Went to the post office again to mail a watch to Hainan.  In Litang the postal worker from hell told us it was forbidden to mail batteries or things with batteries...like watches.  Here we walked in said we would like to mail the watch and the postal worker replied here is a box it is $0.50 and what address would you like to mail it to.  Five minutes and the watch was mailed. Back to the small towns and villages tomorrow.

 

 

Tree and Mushroom Investigation, Part 3

The first several hours of the decent were all in the clouds.  Part way down we landed on a very pretty bench complete with its on creek and the ruins of a stone house. When the clouds cleared we could see the the valley below and several small villages in the distance.  The bench itself reminded me of a campsite in the goat rocks wilderness in WA.  It had a very pleasant feel and watching the creek flow off the bench and disappear over the edge with Mt. Adams and Rainier in the distance was priceless.

 

At the bottom of the big slope and out of the clouds we ran across our first village and the first set of hikers.  It was a group of 4 French people, 3 chinese, and 2-5 guides. It was unclear who was an actual guide and who was just along with their friends.  They had split the trip into three days and were just starting their third day. They also had there packs on horses.  We talked for a while with the guides and the guides friends before continuing down the valley. 

 

Seeing the chinese tourists and talking to them, immediately reminded me of how I dislike chinese tourism.  It wasn't anything in particular about these tourists, but a dislike built up over a year and a half in china.  It is probably not even specific to chinese tourists, it just that domestic tourism is huge in china and I have been around tourists quite a bit.  The bit that got me thinking about these tourists was their brand new full setup. Each had a new pack, new boots, hiking pants,  hiking shirt, heavy jacket, hiking hat, hiking scarf, fanny pack, hiking poles, and big DSLR.  On top of that they were tip toeing around the grass to avoid mud and cowpies, they didnt want get their boots dirty.  Their boots were surprizingly clean, as if they had been tiptoeing for two days or been washing the boots each night. There is just something about the mentality that hiking or experiencing nature means or requires going out and buying a the lot of new things and then trying to keep nature off of them and off of you.

 

The valley was long, 4 hours long and beautiful all the way. A river ran down the center, clear enough to see the gravel and stones at the bottom. Scattered throughout the valley were small stone houses surrounded by shepards, cows, goats, and mules.  Wildflowers were abundant in the meadows along the river.  At the end of the valley the mountains closed in and became much steeper, turning the valley into a ravine.  Shortly there after there was a fork in the trail. On path led down and across the river, the other kept to the side of the ravine and continued.  I knew our destination lay at the end of the ravine, so elected to continue in the current direction.  Ten minutes later we ran into an enormous landslide.  A short inspection revealed a small makeshift path leading up and across the landslide to what appeared to be a road.  The landslide was in fact created by the building of that road.  The trail had been entirely wiped out by road building.  Roads in the area had a distinct impact on the terrain (landslides, runoff, scar like appearances) and as i mentioned on the people and lifestyles.  This particular road had caused landslides up the entire ravine, wiping out all the lower vegetation and uprooting most of the trees, not to mention dumping sediment into the river and changing it to the color of liquid mud. The road builders lived in canvas tents not far from the current end of the road.  The tents were very simple with nothing more than simple metal cots inside.  To support the workers there were several cooks/wives with their own chickens and pigs roaming around on the incomplete road.

 

We made it to the village around 7pm after 11 hours of walking and about 4800ft of decent. The guestho9ouse was run by Teacher Zhang and we were immediately offered pears and grapes while dinner was being prepared. The black flies were horrendous and all attracted to the empty plastic table we sat around. At dinner we were offered wine made by the teacher himself. I of course said yes and came to find out there were some catholic monks in the village 100 years ago who taught the locals to grow grapes and make wine.  The wine was interesting and very sour, but drinkable. Breakfast was yakbutter tea and a plate sized biscuit called baba.

 

The next morning we caught a bus to deqin on a harrowing one lane road.  Siting in front of me on the bus was a very young and very petite lady with pnuemonia.  Every 5min or so she would have a caughing bout that sounded like she was drowning and then spit a mouthful of fluid out the window. I was privileged enough to watch the fluid fly/ streak past my closed window.  In deqin we got another bus the mingyong glacier. 90min up 2600ft and 30min down. The glacier at the top was impressive, but the viewing platform was too far away to really experience the glacier. We did get to see some large chunks calve off and crash down.

 

That night we stayed at another guest house, that rather resembled a three walled barn with some beds because that is exactly what it was. The family had not finished building their house/guesthouse and one entire braod wall was open providing excellent views and a pleasant breeze. The place was family fun, ma, pop, two sons and a pair of senile grandparents. Grandmother was generally ignored by the family while she went about the place doing things i could never figure out. Grampa started drinking liquor by himself around 2pm was drunk shortly after and just sat looking at the landscape and holding his prayer beads. Both were out by 7pm.  The two sons were 23 and 21 and apparently the biggest in the village and good at fighting. No one in the family had gone to school and could read very little chinese or tibetian.  Both of the boys had girlfriends staying with them at the house.  The older son, White Horse or Baima, had a 20something teacher from Hebei, while Rishi had a 45year old deranged finnish lady. The family was very nice and I talked to the father about tibetians and han chinese relations.  I also found out that they started eating rice in the 1980's but still dont like it. 

 

That night two of junyang's friends and a random person they picked up on the trip up joined us at the guesthouse and we all set out the next morning for the second portion of our hike.

 

To be continued...