Here Be Elephants

Mengyang to Menglun 31.4 miles – 11.01.2010
Menglun to Mengyun 32.2 miles – 11.02.2010
Mengyun to Mengla 26.2 miles – 11.03.2010

Fairly uninspired place naming here. I haven’t figured out why everything is called Meng something. The chinese character means ‘brave’, though there are many ethnic minorities in these parts with their own dialects, and it is possible it is a transliteration into chinese characters of a sound in their language, and has nothing to do with ‘brave’. If we were fit, we might have been able to do this in a day, or maybe two. But we aren’t, and we had heard tell of three mountains on the road between Mengyang and Mengla, so we decided to turn it into three days. The three mountains part was true, although they did get progressively lower (or at least, the valleys between them got progressively higher).

It’s all more of the same really as far as scenery goes. The Chinese spoken by people we meet is getting harder to understand, and people are more likely to be wearing ‘ethnic’ clothing – brightly coloured sarongs and head scarves mostly. We found an interesting-looking restaurant on the road going into Menglun, and strolled back there in the evening to try it. It was by a small river, and specialised in barbecued fish. The building was mostly made of bamboo and dried plant matter tied together with string, which really made it stand apart from the flat-roofed concrete buildings, with white-washed interiors illuminated by a bare white lightbulb we’ve been eating in for the most part. The food was also tasty, though our enjoyment of it was marred by an extremely drunk man celebrating his birthday, who insisted on sitting with us all evening repeating himself loudly all night. He addressed himself solely to Matthew, who speaks little Chinese, and spoke to me only to reprimand me for trying to eat when I should have been translating his repetitious drunken rantings. It was slightly worrying that one of his themes was ‘I’m not going to hurt you, relax, I’m a nice guy. All Chinese people are basically nice. But if I wasn’t here, you’d have to be careful’. The most worrying part of the evening however, was when he rejoined his almost equally drunk friends and they all roared off into the night on their motorbikes, with their ladies perched on the back. We are now firmly resolved to avoid the roads at night at all costs.

Matthew is currently trying to fight off a cold and we’ve spent the day attempting to plan for Laos. We’re looking to add some more variety to the trip instead of steadily plodding south. We actually have a guidebook now that we’re leaving China (a Laos/Cambodia/Thailand book has been hiding in our bags this whole time) so it’s hard to resist all the fun stuff it discusses. The fact that we’re under budget about $400 at the moment is also inspiring some splurging. Currently on the potential list is staying in tree houses with zip lines in the jungle, elephant trekking and bathing, and taking a boat down the Mekong.
But for now, we have 30 miles to go to get to the Laos border. I don’t think either one of us will be sad to leave China temporarily and are both excited to be somewhere new.

The maps page (click here) also has a very low resolution version of our full China route in addition to the links for the more detailed sub-routes. It’s satisfying to see just how far we’ve come.

Pictures from this post can be found here

Pages updated: Pictures, Maps, Statistics, Food

~ by Elephants on November 4, 2010.

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