Foiled 24/03/2011: Tonguan to Mojiang 76.71km

This is the 9^th straight day and normal I would be able to handle it but the hills, poor roads have taken their toll and left me (Loon more so) shattered.

Getting out of bed today was a real challenge, my legs felt a bit of stiffness and in general the whole body wasn’t keen on moving. When we did get going it was late but with any luck we should be riding along the highway and make some good time, unfortunately things did not go as planned. Racing through the toll gate back to the highway we did not have a truck to use as cover so we just went flat out, just as we got through one of the toll gate works was screaming after us to stop, I played dumb and waved hello but I had a bad feeling she wasn’t going to let it go judging by her hysterics. About 500m along the highway there was a group of policemen waiting at the petrol station, they waved us to stop, I wasn’t going to play games with the Chinese police, unlike the Laos police (if you could find them) these guys didn’t look  sort to mess around with. We stopped and they spoke to Loon, the reason for them being there was further along the road where it descends 5 trucks in separate incidents crashed and they were here pulling every truck over checking their brakes (drivers in china I believe think the brake is on the steering wheel as they use it on every corner) and warning them. 

Through Loon I tried to plead with them because the highway was shorter, in better condition and to a degree safer than the old road. It was against the law for us to be on here so really we had no chance, soon a police car pulled up and escorted us back, and we also pretended not to know which road we needed to be on so he led us to the correct road.

The old road was awful, it was bumpy, full of pot holes and much longer than the highway, on the highway it was 300km to Kunming, on this road it was over 400km. I wasn’t a happy hamster, I got even more peaved  when we spent about 8km going up a number of hairpin turns with a bird’s eye view of the highway, on the stretch of road I could see there was two vehicles while we were crawling up a crappy road effectively going nowhere, we were level with the same stretch for about 40 mins as we went up and up and up.

There wasn’t anywhere to get lunch, we rode till 1530 by the time we could get food and had only covered 75km, Loon was tired and we opted to find a guesthouse, it was a big town so you wouldn’t think it was hard but the first few won’t allow foreigners to stay and the others were expensive. Loon hatched a plan, he would go to a guesthouse, and I’d keep out of sight and see if we get a good price, it worked straight away.

Getting up to the room we were both done and slept straight away, then it was potter about on the hunt for food, I managed to find a sort of tea that might live up to expectations I’m still to find out. It seems like getting to Shanghi before my visa runs out is going to be a real struggle.