Bus, bus, buuuuus, Xishuangbanna...

Bus. Such a short word, and yet... We did manage to get the 7.30 bus on the Wednesday morning. By midday we were at the first of two intermediate towns on our journey down to the Xishuangbanna capital, Jinghong. A further five hours left us in the second town en route, Jiangcheng, with the sun already set and the next bus to Jinghong due to leave at 6.00am the next morning. Hm - we had expected, or at least hoped, to reach Jinghong that night. Ah well, it could only be another three hours or so the next morning.

WRONG. The 149 kilometres (less than 100 miles!) took us 10.5 hours. That in itself wouldn't have been so bad, if I hadn't had to engineer a second knee joint in my legs in order to squeeze them into the ridiculously small space between my seat and the one in front. We could only assume that there was a mechanical problem with the bus - we didn't get above about 25 miles an hour all day, and occasionally the driver would park up and investigate something under the bus.

What can you do but laugh it off? At least we weren't alone - the couple responsible for our delayed departure from Yuanyang were with us and helped us see the funny side. They had travelled by train from France, through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and most of China, so were suitably battle-hardened. And the food at our lunchtime stop was truly delicious and only about 30p each.

Once in Jinghong, we put our feet up, ate as well as usual, and met up with one of the Dutch couples we'd met in Kunming. Added to the Franco-Argentinian couple from Yuanyang, and with a couple of new strays from the US and Israel, this made quite a cosmopolitan posse, and in a Thai restaurant one night we were invited to share some horrendous moonshine with a group of Chinese workers from Harbin, right up in the north east of the country. The 'conversation' was the usual mix of single-word repetition, mention of Beckham (to much smiling and laughing), Sun Jihai (much delight) and Zidane (much confusion, especially after trying to mime a bald head - the headbutt mime did the trick finally), and pointing at unhelpful words in phrasebooks. After the meal we headed to the night market next to the Lancang river (which becomes the Mekong once it crosses the border) and paid small children to use their rifles. Horrifically unethical as this may sound, we were only firing pellets at balloons. Pretty good fun after a load of nasty booze.


The following day six of us rented scooters and set off for a morning market in a town 40km distant, which of course had long finished by the time we got there. Each tiny roadside village on the way had its own large and mostly deserted Buddhist temple, which made the getting there and back much more fun than the destination itself, as of course is often the case (though perhaps not where buses are concerned).







After four very pleasant days in Jinghong, it was time to head off towards Laos. How else to sign off from China (for the time being - we're definitely coming back) but with a message, in a bus station of course, for us all to ponder...