China has the fastest growing economy in the world, combine that with roughly one billion people and you get one mean powered machine when it comes to forward progress.... not just that, but with a quasi-totalitarian regime that can invoke just about any law they see fit, and quite modern thinking processes (favoring forward movement over antique ideas), a rapidly changing country is the outcome... DUH, like I just told you something you did not already know... but here is the jist of it in a day's travel.
While we as travellers would love to have the places stay the way they were then (e.g. 1998 for me), it is nice when it comes to transport to see the progress, like building new roads.... when a new road is built in europe, it is usually planned to death before a couple of ten guys start buidling it with big machinery, moving at the speed of glacier towards completion...
In China this seens to go like a fast forward compared to Europe, well if you have to pay someone 0.05$/h vs 25$/h it is a little easier getting 1000's of workers to the site, give em all a hammer and have em hammer away (somehow they all seem to know what to do, even though it looks super chaotic.)
Ok, I am finally getting to the point...
We took the bus from Lijiang to Chengdu (or near there, last part by train)... heard that there is a new road that they are building, and that right now it is really difficult to say how long the trip will take.. partly due to the fact that it is rainy season and partly due to the road building... so it was going to be roughly 300km to get to the train station and it was supposed to take 16h.. what!?! Hmm, I was seriously considering biking... sub 20km per hour sounded ridiculous...
So we took off and rode out of town on a newly built freeway going 80km/h, the tar looked half-past fresh and the chrome rails were shiny like some english butler just polished them... 16 hours my @$$ i though! After about an hour of going at full speed we started seeing a couple of chinese workers cleaning up the road, and the quickly became more numerous, when we started slowing down... well we had covered 100km in less than 1.5h, clearly we d be there in less than 10h... chinese bus times were notoriously unreliable. After a bit of a traffic jam dropping onto the old road, I realized this would be an entirely different trip now. The road was rough, narrow, the potholes were so huge that small childred could have swam in them, every time our bus would go faster than 20 km/h a big bump would send us bobbing up and down... not the most comfortable feeling when your butt is sitting on a wooden plank. Now we saw the extent of chinese roadbuilding... hundreds of workers lined up left and right to the road in distances of just a foot or two and were kneeling down, chiseling away whatever it was they were doing, an impressive sight. This continued on for what seemed like an enternal distance, but certainly a couple of kilometers... amazing. The sheer power of masses, these roads were built in minimal amounts of time.
While we as travellers would love to have the places stay the way they were then (e.g. 1998 for me), it is nice when it comes to transport to see the progress, like building new roads.... when a new road is built in europe, it is usually planned to death before a couple of ten guys start buidling it with big machinery, moving at the speed of glacier towards completion...
In China this seens to go like a fast forward compared to Europe, well if you have to pay someone 0.05$/h vs 25$/h it is a little easier getting 1000's of workers to the site, give em all a hammer and have em hammer away (somehow they all seem to know what to do, even though it looks super chaotic.)
Ok, I am finally getting to the point...
We took the bus from Lijiang to Chengdu (or near there, last part by train)... heard that there is a new road that they are building, and that right now it is really difficult to say how long the trip will take.. partly due to the fact that it is rainy season and partly due to the road building... so it was going to be roughly 300km to get to the train station and it was supposed to take 16h.. what!?! Hmm, I was seriously considering biking... sub 20km per hour sounded ridiculous...
So we took off and rode out of town on a newly built freeway going 80km/h, the tar looked half-past fresh and the chrome rails were shiny like some english butler just polished them... 16 hours my @$$ i though! After about an hour of going at full speed we started seeing a couple of chinese workers cleaning up the road, and the quickly became more numerous, when we started slowing down... well we had covered 100km in less than 1.5h, clearly we d be there in less than 10h... chinese bus times were notoriously unreliable. After a bit of a traffic jam dropping onto the old road, I realized this would be an entirely different trip now. The road was rough, narrow, the potholes were so huge that small childred could have swam in them, every time our bus would go faster than 20 km/h a big bump would send us bobbing up and down... not the most comfortable feeling when your butt is sitting on a wooden plank. Now we saw the extent of chinese roadbuilding... hundreds of workers lined up left and right to the road in distances of just a foot or two and were kneeling down, chiseling away whatever it was they were doing, an impressive sight. This continued on for what seemed like an enternal distance, but certainly a couple of kilometers... amazing. The sheer power of masses, these roads were built in minimal amounts of time.
Our trip ended up taking forever, well not quite, but even longer than they announced, 21h I believe, and which was due to party the bad road conditions, the many "normal" traffic jams, but the two most excruciating 2h delays were caused by a fallen over truck (overloaded) and the ability of the chinese drivers to jam themselves into a one way road from both sided so far that neither south nor north was able to retract to let the other party through (would have cost 5 min and saved 2h)... such is traverllers life... no pain a good book cannot alleviate.
Close but no banana... we almost made it past the stranded turned over truck, but unfortunately the bus ahead of us got stuck sliding into the accident vehicle...
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