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Langzhu to Xiahe
Entry 25 of 65 | show all | print this entry |
Our bus driver in Xian , Mr Shu, should have been called Mr Heavy Boot. He wwas the worst driver you could imagine, Foot flat down, hard braking, going for gaps that didn't exist. His passengers were thrown about continuously, and he narrowly avoided half a dozen accidents, all of his own making. We of course con,pained to Chop Chop, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said that there was nothing she could do. She sugggested we closed our eyes and we would be safe.
I tell you this because once we got to Langzhu our new driver was expemplary, which was just as well, because the mountain journey to Xiahe was as dangerous as it was breathtakingly beautiful.
We had set off on an eight hour bus journey into the Tibeten Autonomous Region, We started on a recently completed and deserted expressway which had interesting translations on its roadsigns - Forbid Drunken Drive - no problem with that one, but how about - Forbid Blank Gear For Slip. We made good progress until we turned into the mountains.
Wow, what mountains, the scenery demanded to be photographed. Could we stop the bus? "Not safe" said Chop Chop. We will take a toilet stop soon, and then we could take photgraphs. When we stopped, the light was all wrong for photographs, and we were not allowed to walk up the deserted road because it was too dangerous, Later, we were allowed to walk along the road, in a far more dangerous part, to look at a brick factory and to stretch our legs. As the bus caught us up, Gill and I were having our own toilet stop - Chop Chop stopped the bus on a double bend and actually clapped her hands at me to hurry up and finish. Chop Chop and I are not getting on.
We then joined a very bumpy road and witnessed more of the Go West Policy, a huge road construction project, with several thousand workers along this 50km stretch, with tunnels being bored and bridges being built with a mixture of heavy equipment, primitive wooden carts and the bare hands of both men and women.
We arrived at Xiahe, a 70000 pop one-street toen in the Tibetan regaion. The town seemed like a Wild West frontier townm with herdsmen wandering the streets with their daggers outside their woolen robes - shops selling everything you need to live in the mountains, and some to make the odd buck or two from the back-packing tourists that had managed to find the place.
Gill was trying on a woolly Tibeten shirt, over the top of her existing shirt I must say, when two herdsmen silently walked in. The shopkeeper tried to shoo them away but they just stood and stared at Gill. I hate to think what wsa going through their minds, and of course, there were those daggers. I tried to take a picture of them, big mistake, they weren't having that. We kept looking at plenty of things in the shop, they got bored and the shopkeeper eventually got them to drift off, and when the coast was clear we hurried back to a more populated part of town.
All this has been written after the disaster that took place later that morning
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