Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

2010/06/11 — 149 km

Big day. I wake up abruptly to the alarm at 6:45 after the best sleep I’ve had over the last three nights — and that’s not saying much. I just can’t sleep in a tent. I have a hard enough time getting a good sleep in a comfortable bed these days, despite the daily physical exhaustion.

We get things packed up and get a reasonably early start down the wooded mountain corridor, where we pass dozens of “food and lodging” (食宿) places no longer offering either food or lodging. It’s amazing to think how much commerce used to go up and down this little, two-lane road (national road 國道320), which stretches from the Burma border near Ruili the whole way east to Shanghai, over 3,000 km away. It’s nearly empty now, unless the expressway that has since supplanted it is closed in one direction, in which case it’s a miserable, dangerous mess.

I can only imagine that’s what it was like back when G320 was the main trade artery between Lashio and Kunming, which would explain the dozens of now-derelict eateries.

Still a ways to go, although you never know with these signs, by Andy

After a breakfast of noodles at a Muslim restaurant (they make the best boiled noodles by a long shot when boiled noodles are all there is to be had!), we continue down the road. The valley gradually widens and we are on a wide highway of sorts. We pass two signs that seem to indicate that the expressway that parallels our national road can be reached to the left and that we should continue straight (have a look at the picture to the left and see if you agree with that assumption).

I continue ahead while Evan stops to take some pictures of local architecture and the murals on the walls and climb up a steep mountain for nearly a kilometer. When I get to the top though the road dead-ends at a toll booth. I approach and ask the woman at the ticket window, “This isn’t the expressway, is it?”

Oh, but it is.

“What happened to the national road toward Kunming?”

She gives me a confused look and calls another worker over. After a moment of consultation the man tells me, “You have to go back down the mountain and turn right.”

Knowing that we can't go on the G56 expressway on bikes and we don't want to go to the other place, which way do you think we should go? Photo by Andy

Thinking I must have missed a turn right at the bottom of the slope I send Evan a text not to come up and turn around. Before the real downhill starts I notice a turnoff to the right with a sign indicating that the road goes to four places I’ve never heard of.

“Does this road go to Kunming?” I ask a man sitting on a stoop at the entrance, apparently waiting for a bus.

“Nope,” he assures me. “You have to go down there and go to the right.”

So I head back down the slope, pick Evan up halfway down and then continue to the bottom where we ask a man how we can get to the road to Kunming.

He tells us to go “up there,” motioning vaguely at the mountain behind him, which is in neither of the available directions.

“There’s no road that goes in that direction. Do we need to go back up this mountain to get there or go the other way?”

After a minute of wrangling, we get the man to spell out clearly that we need to go back up the mountain we just climbed and then came back down and get on the road to the four places I’ve never heard of.

It turns out the road is an abandoned expressway built five or six years ago that didn’t pass inspection. It was then replaced with the current expressway, G56, which runs from Ruili to Hangzhou.

Now, I can imagine some greasy local official deciding to hand out contracts for the highway to some of his baijiu buddies who then turn around and use substandard materials and shoddy handicraft. What I can’t understand is how that sort of guy couldn’t bribe the inspection committee to get the highway opened and then have it collapse years later when he’s out of the country with a sack full of money. And beyond that, it’s a little crazy that they just abandoned the thing instead of bringing it up to snuff.

But here we are, climbing the abandoned expressway up, up and up toward the top of the ridge separating us from the rest of the ride into Kunming. At this point Evan and I get into a little tussle over semantics (or “logic” as Evan claims, but I’m still not conceding to any holes in my logic!), and I decide it’s time to continue on alone. If there’s one thing that’s a challenge on a long bike trip with more than one person, it’s balancing multiple personalities, goals and moods. We learn everything slowly, but we’re finally figuring out that sometimes a little alone-time is a necessary release valve.

It starts pouring rain as I approach the abandoned highway’s second tunnel, and I sprint inside to wait out the worst, continuing once it’s slowed a bit.

I’m starving and wobbly by the time I finally reach the crest at 70 km, despite the Clif bar and trail mix I had on the way up. At the exit into the town where our original road, G320, runs through, there’s a sign that says 72 km to Kunming. The abandoned expressway is semi-blocked off ahead, so I exit into town for lunch and to ask which road I should take.

Evan pulls in right as I finish up lunch and we’re told that the old expressway becomes impassable ahead and that we should take the national road. After another few kilometers of riding together, I continue on alone to Kunming, unsure of whether my legs are really capable of carrying me another 75 or so km through the hills.

Of course they are! The next 40 km is a pleasant ride through rolling hills and valleys of rice paddies and vineyards, with the road alternating between smooth, patchwork-quilt-style, and potholed to all hell. With about 40 km left though, everything takes a turn for the worse. Something from lunch hits me wrong, and I’m forced to dive into the bushes every 10 km, moving at a crawl in between these gastrointestinal fits because of my cramped stomach. I hit a roadblock where a bridge is under construction and traffic is being diverted through a town and back onto the abandoned expressway from before, which is covered in cement dust, unpaved, and packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Is that snow on those trees?

The rest of the ride is a pretty miserable experience, but eventually I limp over the last mountain and descend into Kunming, finally reversing the route Evan and I took out of the city from The Hump Hostel in 2008 on the trip that inspired this one.

Evan arrives a few short minutes after I do, and boy do we both look like hell. We haven’t showered since Dali and have been sweating through some majorly dusty sections of road. We shower and attempt to watch the opening match of the World Cup, but have to go back to the room to crash about halfway through.

We’re here in Kunming through Monday when our friend Aaron arrives from Shanghai to spend a week riding with us.