Tuesday, April 29, 2014
We set off from Xiaojin around 8am as we had a long day’s drive ahead of us… none of us knew how long and challenging the day was about to get.
It started innocently enough, as we were slowly gaining more and more altitude… and more. At first the surrounding mountain tops were covered in a pretty dusting of snow. This ‘pretty dusting of snow’ soon turned into ‘snow covered mountains’ soon complemented with snow on the road. So much so that cars were becoming stuck in the fast thickening snow blanket. We’d been carrying snow chains since the beginning of our trip, every now and then wondering why; and, we even considered taking them to Belgium on our short trip over there a few months ago (to pick them back up at the end of the trip). But what do you know: we actually put them on the get over the snow covered high pass!! More and more cars got stuck, blocking trucks coming up and going down. Some drivers (truck and other) did the right thing and waited on the side for oncoming traffic to get passed, but naturally there were the ones who tried to overtake those and causing no end of havoc, blocking everyone for about an hour in both directions. Naturally we got stuck in such a jam. When we finally could continue and make it down the mountain, Ivor and Kuipwagen were waiting for us.
But that was only half the day’s driving done…. it got worse. No more snow but the road (or lack thereof) condition totally turned to custard. You see, when the Chinese decide to start tunneling through the mountains they don’t do any maintenance whatsoever anymore on the existing road, which means the condition of that road deteriorates rapidly. To the point that there isn’t really a road (surface) left. So that is what we had to deal with for the next long stretch. It was a very long stretch of near 4WD conditions (even in the tunnels: they weren’t finished, some had no lights and no road surface…). Quite the adventure really!
About 70 odd kms out of Chengdu we made a little detour to visit the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, reputedly the oldest irrigation system in the world and a Unesco World Heritage Site.
By the time we made it to our hotel in Chengdu it was past 8pm and we were all starving. Lun swiftly led us to a nearby restaurant. After dinner Kim, Vaughan and we went for drinks in Henry’s Int’l Hostel next to our hotel, which happened to have a half decent bar. Nice end to a long day.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Panda day! Up early to beat the main tourist rush at the Chengdu Panda Reserve. We took the local bus which was the easiest way to get there. We had all been looking forward to this visit so naturally everyone was very excited to be there. Beating the rush was great and gave us more opportunities to enjoying observing those amazing creatures. We spent about 4 hours in the reserve and enjoyed every minute of it – except for the part where I (Caroline) got temporarily separated from the others. But in the end I found them all safe and well 🙂
In the afternoon we got into a taxi, arranged by Lun, and drove all the way across the city to a computer superstore to buy new back-up drives. We’d experienced another potentially catastrophic failure on our primary Seagate drive holding all of our photos. Fortunately we had backups. But the back-up drive became the primary drive and now we needed and new backup drive. Not too happy with Seagate as this is the third Seagate drive that has failed on this trip…. needless to say we bought a different brand.
After this successful exercise Stephen was rewarded with MacDonalds (which happened to be just across the road, and Caroline joined in for support) and afterwards we even managed to find a Starbucks. And it got better: we found the mother of all supermarkets in China (very fancy one) where we found cornflakes and Wente wine!!!! (Wente is a vineyard in Livermore, Bay Area, and we know it well). The perfect libation to celebrate Caroline’s 1 year of traveling! Ok, champagne would have been better, but when choice is limited and one finds something good, one won’t be too picky 🙂
We shared the wine with some of our companions after which we thought another visit to Henry’s was called for. We’d become friendly with Jimmy, the manager and he was very happy to see us again. Jimmy christened Stephen “The Mechanic”, which is a little ironic and sad at the same time.
