Here comes the RR connected with the planning: Link

Many thanks for LJH for his saddlebags, which worked great for us.
I also owe felix a drink, his tips were solid.
The bike did well on all the different road surfaces, just make sure to adjust the rear spring pre-load accordingly.

Total distance: 2686km
Time: 19 days
Observations: Yunnan drivers are the worst I ever encountered worldwide and, living in Tianjin, I encounter a lot of bad drivers on a daily basis.
General advice: Honk whenever you do not think it would be inappropriate. Honk. A lot.

We made a lot of pictures, videos, etc. and experienced a lot of things, it was a great trip. I will just try to put some information together...


This is our route, old-school on a map:
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After arriving in Kunming I picked up the bike at Deppon. Plan was to cruise around the city to some sights for one day, then press on to Erhai. Of course just picking up a motorbike at a local shipping company isn’t just that. The bike was there, and well packed – almost.
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Took us a while to peel off layer by layer of the packaging material – but nobody thought about packing the right handlebar, which was scratched. After one hour of haggling I received 100 CNY cash (great.) and 200 CNY discount coupons. Well, good enough.
Next day we left to Erhai, we wanted to stay the night in Dali/Shuangliang, anywhere in this area. From Kunming that is some 450km, so we thought if we calculate 6 hours should be ok. But it was not. First, there is a lot of construction going on in and around Kunming, and in Yunnan in general. So my navigation system app on my Nokia wasn’t always accurate. Some roads simply didn’t exist yet, while many others existed, but were not on the map. Before we found out we already wandered up and down abruptly ending streets for an hour to get out of town. Only the “Map of Yunnan” we bought in our hostel in Kunming for 2 Yuan was up to date and showed all the roads, helped a lot.

But the biggest problem was the national highway G320, which was in terrible condition for the first 2/3. Big areas full of potholes, big, slow trucks pouring water on the road to cool their brakes. I knew I would have the chance to test the bike on loose road surface on this trip, but didn’t think it would be on the first kilometers.

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Highway.

The going was slow. Additionally the road was flooded with driving school Jettas. Before we arrived anywhere it was already dark, at the end we decided to stop in Xiangyun, after more than 11 hours riding.

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This was pretty much the worst part of road during the whole trip. Right next to the highway runs the G56 Expressway, which is newly build and easy to observe while riding the crappy road we were on. I tried to get on the Expressway on two occasions, but they wouldn’t let me (the first guy was laughing, the second was not). A Dali resident expat later said you could sneak on the expressway after dark…
Next day we moved on and the road and the environment was beautiful! We didn’t notice that the surroundings changed the night before when riding in the dark. We rode the last kilometers up to Shuangliang, as felix mentioned the road on the east side of the lake is awesome! It is a broad, new road along the shore of the lake.

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Shuangliang itself was overcrowded with tourists and tourist busses loading and unloading new tourists. I saw a group of Chinese bikers with dual sports, but had no chance to talk to them. But the lodges on the shore were really nice. You seldom see accommodations in China that really deserve to be called “nice”, so I wondered why Shuangliang had such a high density of nice places, while this didn’t seem to spread too far north. Most of them are expensive though, but still fully booked. We managed to find a cheap room at one of the nicer lodges and had BBQ at the shore…
Navigating the bike with bags and two people through the narrow aisles of Shuangliang was another adventure…
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