Wednesday, 25th January 2006

Today it was time to head out of Jinghong. Too many late nights and too much conversation. So Judy and I packed our bags and took a 5 hour bus ride to Mengla. The ride actually took 4.5 hours with a maniac bus driver. How bad was the bus ride? Well there was vomit all over the floor and out of 9 people 4 of them were rather sick. The guy next to us had his head in a read plastic bag for nearly the entire journey. The country side was awesome, but the road was very BAD, nearly as bad as the driving!

Just as we had on our journey from Kunming to Jinghong, our journey to Mengla wound beneath the new freeway pillars that will someday complete the new freeway from Kunming to Laos. Take a look on the map, it's a HUUUUUUGE task. Here they haven't ripped up the hills and valleys. Instead they have left them and almost the entire freeway will be built on pillars.

When we arrived we were shown a flee pit of a hotel and left to find another. A guy found us and took us to the Tianyi Hotel. Here we went from floor to floor talking prices and ended up with an 80 Yuan room for 50 Yuan. Clean and spacious even with CCTV9 China's only English Channel. I don't have it back in Tianyang so every now and then it's good to see how crazy the world really is getting! Then I'm even happier I'm in the south of china with no CCTV9!

We walked around the little city and I was so impressed. Everyone had said it wasn't much of a place to go. I found it very clean and modern in most parts. In the centre we found a little cafe/bar that became our favourite. No English but it did have Corona Beer! No lime but who cares as it had the most awesome joutsa/dumplings ever and the fried rice was unbelievable. They were the only two things on the menu. We sat here and chatted to the children whom stopped and said 'Hello' to us. Later in the evening we walked until we found the BBQ Street and sat for assorted meats on sticks and had to run from little shop to little shop to find one that had cold beer.

Thursday, 26th January 2006

We headed to the market place for breakfast. First off we tried a small sweet ball soup thing. Oh, sooooo sweet and yukki! And there were people putting extra spoons of sugar in. Needless to say we didn't' finish and found the good old won ton soup to fill ourselves on. We then spent the next hour or so trying to find the bus station to take us to the 'Arial Forest Skywalk'. As usual it was the one across from our hotel but everyone pointed us in a different direction. The very bumpy bus ride took us 45 minutes and dropped us off at a run down shack. Here we said the name of the skywalk again in our best Chinese. They laughed and pointed to the shack and up the hill. Ok we said, you beat the Mongols, you must know! So up the hill we went and finally found a new building and a smooth road. Where road went, we still don't know, but it was a bugger it didn't go our way.

We paid our way in and headed out along the trail until we found the stairs to the skywalk. Up we went about 40 feet or something. I'm no good with measurements but later the guy some how got across the numbers 76 and 40, so we guess the trees were 76 and the skywalk 40. Meters or feet, I'm going feet. The skywalk was in parts going from tree to tree. What were we walking on....HHHhhhhmmmm, steel ladders wired together and the sides were like volley ball nets all held up by thick wire cables. I liked the safety thought cables so it was fine by me. It took about 15 minutes of walking and swaying to and fro to complete. We then walked the track until its end before deciding to get our moneys worth and walk the skywalk back. Near the end/beginning the manager was yelling at us to go back the other way. Sorry bud, can't understand Chinese or Chinese body language!

We headed back down the hill to the bumpy road and decided to begin walking home. After 1.5 hours and completing the dirt part we were picked up by a bus and smoothly made our way back to Mengla. We had noticed a little cafe across from our Hotel that had an English menu on its front window, whether it actually sold any of it was another story but we decided to give it a go. Can't say the food was very nice but the staff were very friendly and tried their hardest. We then spent the next 4 or so hour's playing cards at our little cafe in the centre of the city before making our way to BBQ Street for meat sticks and beer until midnight.