Sunday, April 24, 2005

Bus to Kangding


Bus to Kangding, originally uploaded by jiulong.

The first part of any journey to Minya Konka is the long and winding road up from the plains of Sichuan into the foothills of this eastern limit of the Himalayas. Until about five years ago this was a grim journey up crumbling roads via Ya'an and over the Erlang Shan mountain. The road was often one stationary traffic jam of army trucks and it generally took two whole days of bone shaking travel. With the opening up of the Erlang Shan tunnel - and a motorway from Chengdu and Ya'an - you can now get to Kangding in a day. You pass through the historic town of Luding, where Chairman's Mao's Long March had one of its landmark battles - to capture the chain bridge over the rushing Dadu river. Here is my bus at Ya'an, complete with VCD movies on board.

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