Of Pineapples and honking trucks 

We rolled into Menxing in early evening. We thought we might be able to push on, but we were worried we wouldn't find a hotel. So we settled for the Menxing truck stop, a three-block long strip of restaurants and clothes sellers.

The place has a lot of 'hotels' if you can call them that. The first place we asked, a dry goods store, the guys said they had a place to sleep. It turned out to be a beat-up, barren room with a bunch of bunk beds. The price was right at 20 yuan (about US$2.50). But it was so depressing we decided to try another place.

We wandered two doors down to a grocery store and asked them if they knew of a hotel. Turns out there was one upstairs. Now I think that every business in the town has a 'hotel' of some sort.

The room wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. It had two beds, mosquito nets and a fan. To get to the bathroom we had to walk up some steep stairs. As we climbed the building disappeared and we found ourselves on a stairway going up a hill. The bathroom was a disgusting outhouse about 30 feet up the hill--no drainage at all. Just walking in made me want to throw up.

It took about an hour to check in because of confusion with the innkeeper over how much to pay. The rate was 30 yuan. We gave her 50 and half an hour later, she still hadn't brought the change. I ended up enlisting the help of some young English students to track down the lady and get our change. It turns out the lady has a grocery store down the street, and she had to walk all the way there to get the money.

The English students were a riot. They were teen-age girls, and very eager to practice. I was wondering what kind of life they could look forward to in the truck stop when one of them told me she must study very, very hard, because she plans to go to university in Beijing. That's sort of like moving from Barstow, Calif. (truckstop with lots of prostitutes, in the desert), to Boston or New York. I hope she makes it.

We ended up eating in a little cafe and sacking out early. The next morning we got an early start for Jinghong. Twenty kms away, we found Menglun, a great looking little town where we should have stayed (instead of Menxing), complete with a new, luxurious hotel. The town wasn't even on our map (though it was in our guidebook). The town was at a crossroads. We were all set to head right when we asked some locals who pointed us left. We think both roads go to Jinghong, but the left road is a shortcut. We went left.

The road climbed gradually for 20km, crossed a plateau, where we could see all around us for miles and then started slithering into the hills. usually when you're riding on a road that goes into the hills, you have to do a steep climb to proceed. But the road kept whipping around corners into canyons, so for a long, sweet time, we had the thrill of riding through hilly country without the pain.

But all good things end. After awhile, the road began climbing steeply, and then changed to switchbacks. We could tell how steep the road ahead was by listening to the trucks passing. How could we fail to hear them? They all honked like mad at the sight of us. (Uh-oh, another moving object on the road. Better honk). As soon as they passed, we'd listen to them roar away. We'd listen to see if maybe the engine stopped working so hard, a sign that the top was near. Instead, the sound would disappear entirely, and a minute later we'd hear the same truck about 50 feet above us. Ouch.

Luckily, they sell pineapples in Southern China. We bought some (1 yuan each, or about 12 cents--that includes them cutting it up for you. They cut away the outside, quarter what's left, and give it to you on long sticks so you can hold it with the stick and not get your hands all gooey). That powered us to the top.

After that we got a great descent into the Mekong River valley, into the town of Ganlanba. Our guidebook listed the town as a nice place to stay, which it probably is, if you hadn't stayed at a truck stop the night before. We did stop for lunch, though--some weird, meat-stuffed, tofu-looking rectangle on a stick, that had been cooked on a hibachi-style barbecue. It was cheap and pretty good. the vendors were friendly but kept trying to get u s to buy their bananas. We weren't that hungry, and bananas just don't ride well on a loaded bike. So we rode off without them.

The last 30km to Jinghong were remarkable and remarkably frustrating. The road followed the Mekong, and wrapped around the edge of the hillside. That was the remarkable part. then came the traffic. Although millions upon millions of people ride bikes in cities in China, they mostly ride in cities, and Chinese drivers can not wrap their mind around sharing a highway with a cyclist. As soon as they saw us they'd honk. Sometimes it was friendly but most of the time they'd just lay on the horn for the whole time it took to pass.

After an hour of this, I started having flashbacks to Medan, that s-hole of SE Asia. (In Medan the traffic was awful and the local buses, minivans, constantly rushed past us and then slammed on the brakes and cut us off. Look here for our Medan nightmare.) I didn't hit the Chinese cars, like I did some of the local buses in Medan, but I tried to yell at them which of course was futile. I'm sure I amused a few people.

Just outside Jinghong the road narrowed and the cars got nastier. At one point, while letting a truck go around me, I got driven into ankle-deep mud. My tire just kept going deeper and deeper until finally I had to stop and put my foot down, and let me tell you, it was gross. After that I decided I wasn't going to wait for any trucks. I was just going to ride down the road, and if a truck got stuck behind me in a narrow section, so be it.

Sure enough, a truck got stuck behind me on one 50-foot narrow section. It honked and honked and I waved them off. It kept honking. Finally the road widened and they passed. But immediately after that, the road got really narrow again. The truck driver decided to speed up to get through the bottleneck--at the same time that a small car was coming the other way.

They met nose to nose in the middle. Neither would budge. Eric and I squeezed by on the side. Still they sat, stubbornly. (Eric: As we passed, I muttered 'You're so STUPID') They must have sat there for about 10 minutes because no traffic passed us for a long time. When the truck driver finally did get through, he seemed a little chastened. He didn't honk quite as obnoxiously. Or maybe his battery was wearing down.

The road got worse and worse. We reached the outskirts, which looked like one big truckstop, with muddy streets and no sidewalks. I kept thinking, Please, Don't let this be it. It wasn't. We got a little lost trying to find the bridge across the Mekong to Jinghong (the Chinese are building a very big impressive looking suspension bridge, which we tried to use, but it was still under construction.)

The town was a welcome sight. It's a vacation spot for Chinese who want some sun. It has wide boulevards with huge bike lanes on each side, and hundreds and hundreds of people riding bikes. We checked into a swank hotel (roughly US$15? per nite) where we stayed for three days.

Next: Jinghong

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