It was another great day today, yes! It didn't start that well though. Ellen had had a bad night with diarrhoea, and when we got up this morning it was raining - really raining. So, did we even want to leave today? We took our time, had our breakfast, waited a little more, and decided after a while that it was all fine to go. By the time we left, it had stopped raining - and obviously Ellen was feeling a lot better.
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| View from our room yesterday afternoon, the rain was certainly expected. |
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| Getting out of Yuanmou, on a road under construction, always a pleasure. |
Getting out of Yuanmou was, as usual, not the most interesting part of the ride. There were some construction works, add the rain to that, and you get a muddy and chaotic road. This lasted for about 5km, after that the road was fine but with a lot of traffic still, and boring. But after about an hour, things started to get better and better, and eventually became really nice again. It was 35km cycling in the valley, a very wide and mostly flat valley surrounded by high mountains. After 35km we started to climb, and that is where today's ride really became fantastic.
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| Coffee break time! This time with a fantastic view, seated perched on a ledge above another such stone forest. By the way, about the plastic bags and bottle in the picture: we've been using the same bag already since KL, and refill the bottle daily; so no, we have not gone back to unnecessary plastic wastage although it's impossible to avoid plastic entirely in China. Everything is double and triple wrapped in plastic here, it would be hard to survive trying to avoid buying products in plastic packaging... |
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| Ellen checking on maps.me when the climb will start, and how much we'll have to climb. The answer: another 8km to go, and then around 18km climb to ascend about 600m. |
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| Another gigantic solar farm on our way today, what you see here is just a little fraction of the entire installation. |
It was almost 20km climbing, in a magnificent landscape, with little traffic. The climb was gentle, the weather had turned beautiful by then and thanks to the altitude the temperature was just perfect. There was still quite a bit of wind, sometimes headwind, sometimes backwind - happens when you're on a very winding road. We've had quite a lot of wind and clouds the past couple of days, but if we can believe the weather forecast, that will change for the better from tomorrow.
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| Fantastic scenery again, and very different again as well. A lot of eucalyptus forests (which you don't see on this picture), with according nice smell, made us feel in Australia already... |
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| We took our own picnic for lunch today, as we knew there was little restaurant option on our way. Bonus: the view from our lunch location. |
We arrived in Yongren, a small town, with a pleasant riverside to walk around, and found a nice and cheap hotel with very friendly people. After doing our usual shopping (bread, yoghurt for breakfast, some chocolate, a cold drink...) we had dinner; we ordered vegetables and some "fried grated potatoes" (it said potato wire on the menu), which turned out to be something like small FRIES. Yummy, unexpected treat!!!
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| Nearly at the highest point, around 1600m asl, what a view!!! |
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| Yes another milestone reached! |