Under bus ride, another experience. We left Jinping on time and stopped about 200 meters down the road. We waited for 20 minutes while friends, family and relatives of the driver got on or gave the driver packages to deliver. Then we crawled slowly out of town (soliciting business along the way). We immediately climbed into the mountains. The road would have been single track in Canada but the vehicles are smaller in China and the drivers aren’t too bad. So most of the time the passing worked OK. However the road is one of the few flat surfaces in Yunnan province so you never know what to expect. Along the way the driver had to stop for water buffalo, pigs, dogs, chickens and of course people. The people all walk with their back to the traffic and don’t always move over. The scenery was grand – terraced fields down mountain sides and rock formations that made it look like the villagers were growing fields of rocks. We also drove into a weekly market. This was also our breakfast stop so I got off the bus and bought breakfast. I handed it to Joan through the window and I had to reach over the vendors in the middle of the road. We had been stopped for 5 minutes so the vendors set up along the street side of the bus. I was taking pictures of the market when the bus restarted. I couldn’t get back to the bus because of the crush of vendors and buyers, but the bus couldn’t go fast anyhow so I caught up to the bus eventually.
The bus only went halfway to our destination and I was unsure of whether we could get a bus right away or wait till the next day. As we got off the bus several mini bus drivers approached us with offers of a lift to wherever. We took the one going to Xinjie and off we went. We arrived at our destination at 2 o’clock. One of the passengers spoke English and he worked at a hotel, so we got dropped off at our hotel and he had arranged with the minibus driver to drive Joan and I around all the next day. I was pleased with the price for both.
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