National Highway G110, which runs from Beijing to Lhasa, is not a fun road. We were forced to ride it for several days for lack of other options out in the desert, and we regret almost every moment of it. On our second day in Inner Mongolia, the pavement disappeared and we were left with dust, trucks and a driving headwind. Here, a masked Dave struggles with the final stretch before our expensive lunch in a concrete imitation yurt.
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.” (more…)
Workers, who earn wages of 50 yuan ($7.32) per day, carry metal cages down an under-construction highway outside of Changning (昌寧縣城), Yunnan. The cages will be filled with rocks and placed along the side of the river below to keep the bank from eroding. In this part of the country, where there is so little industry (thankfully for us), these men are happy to have any work at all. For comparison, we met a peasant family taking a cartload of cabbages to market who expected to gross 60 yuan ($8.79) for the load, and they don't sell a cartload of cabbages five days a week.
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