Yesterday I said goodbye to Mark, and to Dali, and headed off on my adventure westward toward Burma.
I couldn't buy a ticket to Tengchong in Dali Old Town, since the buses left from Xiaguan (Dali New Town, about 15 km away). So I took a public bus most of the way to the bus station in Xiaguan, then walked the rest. I got there at about 9:15 AM, in time to buy my ticket for the 10 AM express bus.
I was impressed by the public bus system in Xiaguan and Dali - the buses were big and spacious, and seemed to also be frequent and efficient (and easy to navigate).
I was assigned an aisle seat for the busride, which was annoying because I wanted a window. Luckily a man in a window seat in front of me switched to a different seat in the back of the bus, so I took his window seat, next to an older man.
Nobody on the bus spoke English. It took a while to actually leave Xiaguan, but once we did, the road was fast. The expressway has been extended west from Xiaguan - I'm not sure how far it goes now, but the aim is to connect it all the way to Ruili and the Burmese border. This new highway means travel times are a lot shorter - we drove on the highway for two hours, through several tunnels and across the extremely brown and fast moving Mekong River, and then stopped for bathrooms and lunch just outside Baoshan.
The man who was sitting next to me on the bus paid for my bathroom ticket, which was very nice of him. I think he thought I wouldn't know how to pay on my own. Later I shared my rice crackers with him. After bathroom, it was lunchtime, and everyone from my bus went into a restaurant where most people got a meal on a silver tray - much like a thali meal in India. Everyone got a small serving of several dishes: green beans and potato salad, eggplant with chili, cold salad of ma-la fatty pork, pork with pickled veggies, french fries, peanuts and rice. On the side everyone also got a bowl of vegetable and garlic soup. This cost me 10 RMB, which is about $1.25. While nothing was outstanding, I definitely prefer Chinese rest area lunches to American rest area lunches.
After lunch, we continued through the valley surrounding Baoshan, then went up into the hills again before making an impressive descent into the valley of the Salween River. The Salween River, according to Wikipedia, is the longest un-dammed (or however that's spelled) river in Asia...it starts in Tibet, then flows through Yunnan province before going into Burma and Thailand and emptying into the sea near the Burmese/Thai border. Many major Asian rivers go through Yunnan province - north of Dali, near Lijiang, the Yangzi River goes through Tiger Leaping Gorge before flowing north an east through Sichuan and out toward Shanghai....the Mekong flows south from Yunnan to Laos and Vietnam, and the Shweli River (which I would cross later just before arriving in Tengchong) is a tributary of the Irawaddy, which is the principal river of Burma.
At the Salween River, we left the highway to head west toward Tengchong on a smaller road. Down by the river, the landscape started to look a lot more tropical. I saw fields of sugarcane and coffee, as well as banana and mango trees. The bus got hot too, since it seemed like the air conditioning only worked when we were going downhill, which was only about 50% of the time.
We drove through a lot of forest - the least populated part of China I have seen so far - and then made our way down to the Shweli River valley, then it was about 45 minutes more driving on curvy roads before we arrived in Tengchong. As promised, the busride only took 6 hours (including the lunch stop), so it wasn't too bad at all - I was able to listen to my ipod which helped block out the movies blasting on the TVs in the bus, and the seats had decent leg room so I wasn't as squished as I was on the busride from Kunming to Dali.
When I arrived in Tengchong, I took a taxi straight from the bus station to He Shun, a small village about 6 km outside town. That's where I spent last night and I'll be staying there again tonight - it's very pretty and peaceful and there are a ton of nice houses and gardens, since many of the former residents are rich and have sent a lot of money back to the village. Tourists also come to visit the village on day trips, and there is a 30 RMB entrance fee, which I avoided since my taxi went straight through the gate without stopping. I will hopefully return to the village late enough tonight that the ticket collectors won't be working anymore, so I'll avoid the fee again.
