Well, 3 days again since the last post: not much to tell about the first day, too late too cold yesterday, so today is the day. Let's go chronologically again. 2 days ago we rode from Panzhihua to Miyi. It was a day of 84km, quite hilly, with no very long climbs but many half long ones. The weather was nice and quite hot - we liked it. Getting out of Panzhihua was interesting of course, as it always is to get out of a big city. We descended to the road beside the river, a good and big road, 4 lanes and sometimes 6, not very comfortable cycling but traffic was light luckily. We just followed the road for about 5km or so, then crossed the first possible bridge to the other side of the Jinsha River where it would be much better. Once we got to the other side, there were some heave roadworks which we had to pass, it was a bit of a struggle, people told us it was not possible, but with the bicycles it was definitely possible, and after some short delay we got onto our intended road and ready to continue our journey.
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| The valley of the Ertan dam, with blue and brown river water coming together. |
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| Beautiful riding through a rural valley, quite steep in some areas. |
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| A lot of these red flower trees (a bit in the back here), they're called silk cotton trees. |
It was quite beautiful riding for the biggest part. The road followed the valley of the Yalong River and later on the Anning River, really nice. We passed the valley where the Ertan dam has been built, apparently one of the biggest hydroelectric stations in China. We also passed 2 smaller dams, funny how the same river is generating electricity multiple times. It was a beautiful and fun valley to ride through, until we reached the "modern agriculture industrial zone", an area full of greenhouses producing tomatoes, beans, strawberries and surely many many other things too... We reached Miyi after 84km, and were pleasantly surprised to find a clean, pleasant, organised small city. We rode to a place where we thought we'd find a homestay we'd read about.
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| Downhill through the valley, just before reaching the modern agriculture zone. |
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| Enjoy the modern agriculture... |
Well, there was no homestay there, but there were people ready to help us find it. They tried to find it, drove around in their car with me, went to all kinds of places which I could have told them were not the right ones, and in the end - after 1,5h - found a Chinese way out (saving face...) to accept we could not find the place. It was not that important for us, but they really just wanted to help us. This was the second time in 2 days that people tried to help us at any cost - even beyond our patience this time... Anyway, in the end we found a really nice place to stay, and we had a very nice dinner just next door as well.
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| For some of our Malaysian friends? |
Then we move on to yesterday: Miyi to Dechang. I could summarise this in a few words: this was probably one of the least interesting days of our entire trip so far! The scenery was not nice at all; definitely not along the S214 first, and then just slightly better from the G108 afterwards (by the way, this G108 goes all the way to Beijing, about 3000km further up - not our intention to go all the way...). There was a lot of traffic, many trucks as usual, which comes with a lot of honking. The weather was also not good: it was cloudy, and towards the end we had some rain - and a lot of wind (again headwind of course); the last few kms before Dechang it was becoming heavy wind, to the extent that some wind gusts almost blew us of our bicycles. Later on I read in the weather report that there was a gale warning... It was not a nice day, but it's also psychological: we thought it would be a relatively easy day, but it was very hilly, and we did 96km after all. Add all that: hills, headwind and 96km, and it makes for a pretty tough day. Something interesting this day, were all the fruit plantations. It was full of mulberry farms, acres and acres - I had no idea that many mulberries were produced at all. Also some kind of fruit we don't know, small yellow fruits, individually wrapped in paper bags on the trees before harvesting...
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| It was even difficult to find a nice place for a coffee break, go figure! |
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| A lot of the Chinese riverbeds look like this, moonscapes, excavated for construction materials. |
Anyway, we were very happy to be at our destination after 96km of "don't think, just pedal" but Dechang brought us some positive side too. We didn't see anything from this town; it was too late, too cold, too unpleasant weather, too tired. But we had a very friendly girl at the reception of our hotel, who spoke English really well, a welcome change. When we went for dinner, the people at the restaurant were also extremely friendly and even though we could not really talk to each other, we still communicated nicely. Then there was a small group of boys in the restaurant and again one of them spoke good English. He helped us with some fruit shopping and it was nice to talk to him a little. All in all, we spent little time in Dechang but the few people we met there were so friendly! Our hotel room was smelly and humid, but the shower was good and the bed was great, and we had a great night...
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| We did have a few nice views too: here a narrow canyon. |
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| And the mountains becoming a bit nicer too - if we could see them. |
We were not sure what kind of weather to expect this morning, and it was indeed still overcast and cold when we left - and really cold! We left, started with some climb to warm up luckily, and then had slowly improving weather, sun coming through, and the light breeze turning from head- to backwind. The scenery was fine today, not as great and fantastic as we have had before (yes, I'm afraid we've been spoiled a bit), the weather was fine, and it was "only" 66 relatively easy km. It feels good to have a day like this for a change! What was impressive today, was the enormous wind farm we saw. For the first 40km (that is FOURTY!) the valley was full of wind turbines. Impossible to say how many there were, but it would have been many 100 if not a few 1000! Incredibly impressive, I'm pretty sure there was more wind energy capacity in this one valley, than in Belgium all together...
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| Riding through wind turbine valley. The heavy winds we had yesterday were maybe not so exceptional... |
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| Sun coming through... |
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| Wind and agriculture |
Then we arrived in Xichang and checked in to a nice hostel, the Skylark Hostel. It's close to Xichang's Qionghai park, a massive waterfront park, in which we went for a short walk; it was really nice and well done. It's a welcome change, because in the last few days, we have seen more of the China we were not looking forward to: every little bit of surface is either built upon, or used for agriculture; and there are people everywhere. It gives a very full feeling... But ok, back to Xichang, a dinner story. We went for dinner around the corner from the hostel, just a local restaurant, ordered some dishes from the menu (with the help of google translate thank you), were enjoying our great food, and suddenly had some people from the table besides us join us. They wanted to have some drinks with us, wishing us welcome to their city, a few cheers and photos with a Chinese liquor, ... Good fun (although the liquor was not that nice), a few rounds of ganbei (cheers), a few friendship words, and great memories. And once again, when we asked for our bill, it had been settled by... our new friends! Wow, people in this region seem really friendly! A great experience again, really, we like China!
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| We made a picnic lunch break today, next to an olive estate (yep, they have that too in China!). China is quite clean in many places, but not always and everywhere! |
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| First olives, then grapes and from grapes: wine! We cycled through a village where there were many roadside stalls selling local wine. We didn't try it out however... |
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| Our new friends at the restaurant |