RR: South of the Clouds

[AndyCCAA]

Related to this thread
http://www.mychinamoto.com/forums/sh...nd-Trip-Yunnan
I will now share the complete Ride Report with you. Since im still travelling I can't promise regular updates. We experienced so much during the 3 weeks that it just takes a lot of time writing it down and selection pictures. I hope you will enjoy my Impressions and Pictures!

By the way - it turns out that the slowest part of doing this report is uploading the images. That's partly because off the slow free Wifis im using, but it's also because all (western) filehosters I know are slow in China in general. Does anyone know a hoster easily/quickly accessable from China? Until then I'll have to compress the pictures to lower resolution & lower quality...

Epilog


Before we started our Tour in Yunnan we first went to the very cold nord-east of China to spend a day in Harbin. We travelled from Beijing by Train with an overnight train and arrived at ~7am. After we finally found our apartment building – and figured out that the friendly lady tried to explain us we could get into our rooms only after noon but could leave our luggage with her – we first had a little bit of Chinese breakfast.



After that we decided to take a stroll through down to pass time till noon. With enough clothes the freezing temperatures were almost ok!






The apartment itself was surprisingly huge, which made up for the interesting taste in furnishing.




My bed.

And my reaction to my bed.


Next on the list was the Siberian Tiger Park. Impressive animals and really worth seeing. The way the tigers always walk around right next to the fences shows that the big area is still not huge enough for animals like that though.


Yep, you can spend 60 RMB on feeding the tigers live chickens. Or all other kind of stuff up to a whole cow.


And a chinese guy did.











In the evening we visited the Ice Festival. Perfect Timing because it was close to sunset and got really cool once it was dark. Unfortunately Davids Camera run out of battery and my cellphone – as good as its camera is during the day – couldn’t cope with the bright lights at night at all. Anyway pictures don’t come close to the impression you get there.


Good way to cope with the cold :)


[IMG]http://abload.de/img/2014_01_09_17_39-001c0j3u.jpg[IMG]





Oh, in the evening we could also enjoy a pretty good live performance from some local expats.


"White Sugar"

The next day we already took a flight down south to Yunnans provincal capital, Kunming. Here we spend another day sightseeing before starting our Trip the next day. Impressions of Kunming and the first day on the road will be in my next post!

[AndyCCAA]

Day 1: Kunming -> Luquan

We decided to stay in Kunming for one day to do some sightseeing, to enjoy the sun after the cold north and to do some crucial last time shopping.


Love on first sight.

The next day finally was the first day of our roadtrip. We didn’t leave as early as planned, partly because we tend to sleep to long and partly because we didn’t know motorcycles are banned in the centre of Kunming. So we walked to the office of Ride China, which was really close to our hotel, just to find out we had to pick up the bikes somewhere else. Totally not their fault since they sent me an email which I hadn’t checked yet. But Jah, the guy who rented us the motorcycle, was really helpful and explained the cab driver over the phone where to bring us.

By the way, time for some recommendation: If you want to rent a bike or even do a guided tour around yunnan (or into Sichuan or even Tibet), check out ridechina.com. The bikes were in good condition, everything went really smooth and Jah was helpful with any problem we encountered on the road.

So getting to the bikes, packing all our stuff onto them and handling the paperwork – 100 Kuai bills are really a pain in the ass when handling larger amounts – we were on the road at 12:30 am, way later then we planned. To make things worse it started to not only rain cats and dogs but also to hail…


That's not how you want a bike trip to start.

David unintentionally decided to test out the capability of the front brakes – yes, they work well, lesson learned, be easy on the brakes under these conditions… Luckily nothing on the bike was damaged so we could go on. Worst part of the day was going through a tunnel half way. Not only was it poorly lit (better say, not lit at all…) but all the mud, rain and exhaust emission added up to the most slippery thing I have ever encountered apart from ice. I lost my bike just going straight, still don’t know how that worked. Out of shock David unintentionally decided to test out the capability of his rear brakes – yep, they work well too… Anyway, since we were only doing like 20-30 kmh nothing happened and we could go on.


Checking up the bikes before going on.

We were not the only ones to struggle that day though. I saw at least a dozen accidents, many of them trucks or busses crashed rather badly like getting stuck in the ditch or even one truck flipped to its side. What a great impression to start your first roadtrip in China!


That would take some time...

After lunch things got better, the rain stopped and the roads become much better, yet still being wet of course. Originally we wanted to get to Yuanmou, but because of our late start and the conditions we only made it to Luquan right on sunset. Still soaking wet we stopped in the middle of the town to discuss where to look for a hotel, but coincidental we just had to turn around to find one. It was really cheap (60RMB for the double room) and they let us put the bikes in the Lobby.


Safe Parking.


We used the last couple of hours of the day to explore the town – nothing special really, just a usual small Chinese town. We found a good restaurant though and were surprised by Long Island Iced Teas based on Baijiu… Hard to believe but they actually were quiet good!


Summary of the day put into a picture.


Daily distance: ~85km
Total distance: ~85km

But don't worry, from here on things got way better. We had beautiful weather for the whole trip except one day and those turned out to be the worst roads of the entire trip. After that (except for small parts and the obligatory road constructions) we only had great roads and awesome landscapes, more on that in my next post!

[zhu]

hey Andy nice report. Those tunnels are the pits of hell . Well done not getting run over by a truck!

[ThePope]

Oy vey, what a way to start out the trip with some minor crashes! Good luck!

[AndyCCAA]

Yes, that's really not how you want to start a trip! But since we already finished the trip I can spoiler you: These were our only crashs (except my mate doing some falling over when standing still ;) ) and both us and the bikes returned to kunming in fine condition.

[AndyCCAA]

The next day we hit the road at 9:30 am – it could have been earlier if it wasn’t for the snooze function on Davids cell phone. But for the next 2 weeks I’d have to get used to him taking a lot of time in the morning anyway

We continued to follow the G108 North/West. At first the roads were still soaking wet and muddy at a lot of sections as well but at least the scenery got better already. It was also very cold; at one point we even encountered snow along the roadside at a mountain pass. Fortunately everything changed the second we entered the valley behind that mountain. The sun showed up and the roads became better!


First glance at the beautiful sceneries awaiting us.


Road conditions we still had to cope with.


Snow!


The valley behind that very mountain.


Awesome roads!

We made it to Yuanmou around 3pm and had lunch there. After half an hour we pushed on, excited that it was finally time to leave crowded G108. We wanted to make most of the way towards Dali on X322. Since X322 meets G108 much further north we decided to take some small roads as a shortcut. Turned out to be no shortcut at all though – while there was only one small road on our GPS there were actually a lot of equally sized roads leading to all kind of villages or just into the fields so we got off track a lot.


It was either getting wet or driving way way back. After we saw locals doing it like it was nothing we finally dared to cross it ourselves. You can see the stones in the water on the left, there was actually a not so deep path. But better not get off it...


A reason to stop that we would encounter a lot later on our trip.


Once we got onto X322 – it was half past four by now – we encountered amazing tarmac that we would not have expected. Sadly no photos from this part since we had to hurry to find a hotel before sunset. We made it to Hewei Reservoir by 6pm. Surprisingly there were hardly no places to sleep at all – or we were just not good at spotting Chinese hotels yet. Took us a while to cross the lake once entirely because there was a sign to scenic spot, a stone forest which name I forgot. We thought maybe there would be hotel around, but they could just offer to let us camp inside the area for 100RMB per person – yeah, thanks, but no thanks, if we are going to camp we gonna do that for free somewhere else…
We knew we passed one hotel which looked a little bit pricy from the outside but since we had no choice we drove back to it, arriving at half past 7. Turned out it was totally empty yet still open. Since it was already dark they saw an opportunity to overcharge us, asking for 188RMB the night. They couldn’t really argue our reasoning that they had no guests at all so we at least got em down to 100rmb. A small success after another day of covering less kilometers than planned.This should change the next day, when roads and weather were awesome all day.


Daily distance: ~135km (including getting lost and driving roads twice)
Total distance: ~220km