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Monday, April 13, 2009

Jumping Tigers




Yunnan is the shit. Each day we ride in beautiful weather through valleys and over passes that just keep getting sweeter. The rolling hills are quickly turning into what would be called mountains in the States, the villages are thinning out and so is the air. Each night we go to sleep in a place very different from where we woke up. Each morning we look at our cheap map (that we cant read) and pick out roads that might work. Life is good. My only complaint is that the beer is terrible and the rice wine even worse. The language barrier is interesting and leads to many hilarious/ awkward interactions (like when we mistook a brothel for a restaurant).

From Dali we took a right and headed north. Going out of town we stumbled upon the spring festival with horse racing/ shooting, music, food and tourist madness, we even saw a couple laowai (the first in a week or so). We couldn't stomach the crowds or the $20 fee for the Three Pagodas so we just rode by and headed for Lijang.

Today we decided to take a day off and run through Tiger Leaping Gorge. Its a little touristy but outside of peak season we only saw a couple other groups. Its a fairly impressive gorge but Im skeptical a tiger could actually jump it. It felt good to change it up and stretch the legs a bit. Prior to this trip we were fresh of ski season and hadnt been on bikes for 5 or so months. Our bodies have been holding up surprisingly well, a couple sore spots but hopefully nothing that will stop us from procreating.

Tomorrow we will continue to head north, picking up the Jinsha (Yangtze) river at its bend and following it for a while. After a couple days we are going to try to jump the ridge west on back roads into the Lacang (Mekong) River drainage at the heart of the Three Parallel Rivers. UNESCO site. If the little gray squiggly line on our map is a road we will follow it up river all the way to Deqin on the Tibetan boarder. We will see what happens then.


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