Day 55

24/08/2009

It was sad this morning to be saying good-bye to Rachael after nearly eight weeks travelling together.  She will fly from Kunming to Bangkok on Wednesday afternoon and spend a few days there before returning to the UK and looking for a job.

Tom is continuing with us into Laos.

The distance to the Laos border is about 800km and with two days to cover it we'll split it roughly in half.  This should mean about 6 hours driving each day, roads permitting.

Driving in China has been quite an experience aswell as something of a privalage few non-residents experience.  In our 3 weeks here we've only seen 6 other non Chinese registered vehicles, all of which were German.  The first 5 were travelling together and passed us on the expressway a couple of days after we entered China.  They were serious overland vehicles in the Paris-Dakar support truck style.  The 6th we saw in the queue to a toll booth so we were able to exchange a few words with them.  They were doing a tour of China then heading back to Germany via Mongolia and Russia.

On today's drive we crossed a bridge which the road signs claimed was the highest bridge in the world. I haven't been abe to check out this claim but the bridge name was Hong He for anyone wanting to check.

Today we reached Simao which seems to have enough hotel rooms to sleep most of China so we got a very good room for less than £10.

Pat and Simon didn't eat with us again this evening.  The restaurant we went to was interesting in that it didn't have a menu - you simply chose your ingredients from those in the chilled cabinet and the chef created dishes for you.

Lat 22 46.49 N
Long 100 58.62 E
Town Simao

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