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Our night in Yuxi was fine apart from all the fireworks blowing up outside our hostel window....I felt sorry for our friendly hostel night porter who tried to calm things down on many occassions by shouting at the top of his lungs at all the kids outside. His attempts were pretty futile!!!
Looking Good Brian
We are very anxious to get to Kunming and onto Chengdu as quickly as possible to organise our tour into Tibet. We hear that Chengdu is the best and fastest place to organise the relevent permits for Tibet. Its going to be hell trying to organise things for Tibet and especially having 3 expensive touring bikes to bargain into the equation.
Todays cycle is pretty straightforward. Its approx 90km or so with 50km of that being nice and flat. We start the cycle discussing the finer points of Jack Charltons impact on Irish soccer. We also try to recall the entire USA 1994 squad.
The rest of the day was fine. The weather is gettting cooler (especially the mornings) and we usually wear our fleeces for the first 5-10km until we are properly warmed up. We cannot stop talking about going to Everest Base Camp (EBC) which should be a highlight of the trip. After about 40km, we decide to have some Chinese Green tea and soft breakfast type bread rolls with a pork/chicken dish...(very tasty!!)
We reach Kunming for about 3pm and decide to head straight to a travel agent in the centre of town to try to organise our safe route into Tibet. We make some great headway when we meet a man named "Laurence" who tells us that we can start our trip to Tibet right away and that we will have to stop at Chengdu for a couple of days to finalise permits and train tickets etc etc. We are very happy to proceed and decide to stay in Kunming for one night and head to Chengdu in the morning....Tibet here we come!!!!!!
Straight for a bit of Western!!
Kunming is a vibrant place with tonnes of historical sights on offer including The Yunnan Stone Forest. (Shi Lin in Chinese), which is about 120 kilometers from Kunming city. The Stone Forest hold magnificent stone masterpieces, various strange and steep intricate formations, and countless labyrinthine vistas.....They would be nice to visit but we have Everest on our minds at the minute. There is also the matter of visiting Panda's in Chengdu so we dont feel so bad overlooking The Stone Forest....
Our guesthouse is great tonight. We have a cosy 3 bed dorm with hot water on demand so its fantastic. Shut eye for the bikers..Zzzzzzzz.
We shall talk tomorrow..
The lads.
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