Rain & fog
Alt: 3200m to 3550m with higher passes on the road
A day of sitting on an old bus from 7:30am to 4:30pm heading the 187km to Deqin 德欽, a little town further north towards the Sichuan and Tibetan borders. It was quite relaxing and uneventful, but we seemed to be climbing uphill most of the time so the bus was slow. Indeed, the road goes over some high passes and at the highest sections it was very cold with snow on the ground. Some of the views were good, but generally the weather was poor and visibility was not more than about 5 metres for hours which was a bit unnerving as the road twisted and turned giving you tunnel vision. Some of the locals were looking decidedly ill.
Deqin seemed a nice little place upon our arrival nestled into a sloping valley with really only one main street which was very steep in places. It took almost an hour to barter for a reasonable rate for a room (Y10 each) with a Japanese guy helping us. He was pretending he was Chinese from a far off province to ease the way and was communicating using writing which is similar to both countries for some words. The hotel was quite good though and was supposed to have hot showers which was going to be important at this altitude.
We were off the normal backpackers trail now - no cafes serving banana milkshakes and menus in English, so for dinner we were in a local place. Menus were chalked onto the walls in Chinese and other scripts, we guessed Tibetan, but were of course useless to us We were invited into the kitchen and pointed at various ingredients we wanted putting together, eg eggs and tomatoes or some Chinese mushrooms and green vegetables, said "chow" = "fry" and let them get on with it. As much as possible we tried to stick with vegetables, there being no refrigerators in sight. With boiled rice and a few beers it was a lovely meal, though, without us asking, everything had been laced with hot chillies.
The little town was dead after our meal, so we ended up playing cards in our room.
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