What can I say? These two days have got to be the two shittiest days of my trip. We (David "Danish", Phil "Wiganer", Hugo "The Dutch Guy" and myself "Convict") left Lijiang on a 280km trip to Panzhihua where we were supposed to connect to an overnight train to Chengdu - sounds pretty easy right? Wrong! I woke up with the worst case of travellers sickness with a migraine, stomach cramps, chills and aches all over. Nevertheless I had to push on and get to Chengdu. The bus ride to Panzhihua from Lijiang was supposed to be extremely scenic as we pass over 3000m mountain passes with views of lush and green Chinese farming villages below - there's a mixture of rice paddys and what I'm guessing are potato plants so its like a patchwork quilt on the valley floor.
Unfortunately I spent alot of the time carsick and drifting in and out of sleep as the mountain roads are much twistier than the old Pacific Highway, much narrower and the altitude gets to you a bit as well even though it's only 3000m. It all made for a hair-raising ride on a rickety, dirty old Chinese bus. We'd got about 2 hours into the trip when I opened the window and spent 5 mins with my head outside just throwing up as the bus continued along - luckily I was sitting on the right side of the bus so I didn't need to worry about the oncoming traffic, I made quite the mess on the outside of the bus as lump bits stuck to the side.
We got to Panzhihua at about 3pm (7 hours to do 280km!) - and then had to take another public bus for over an hour to get to the train station. Panzhihua is the grimmest, most industrial city I've ever seen in China - I counted no less than 3 coal power plants with their huge cooling stacks and heavy industry lining the Yangtze valley that its sitting on. The hills further above are barren probably from the acid rain the place cops while the water that flows down the river through the city turns from a nice fluorescent blue to this black sludge.
Much to our dismay, we found out at Panzhihua train station that all tickets to Chengdu on all trains in all classes of travel (I was prepared for a no-seater) were sold out till 4th March. What were we supposed to do? All I could think was to push further North so we bought tickets to go to Xichang which will take us another 240km North halfway to Chengdu from Lijiang tomorrow.
I feel like absolute crap right now, we're living inside some 12rmb/pp/per night accomodation next to the bus terminus which isn't too bad. At least I had a hot shower in the common shower room which looked like the 'shower room' out of the Auschwitz concentration camp. My head is aching so hard that I'm going to sleep now at 8:30pm.
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