China, Yunnan province, 150 kilometres Northwest of Dali.
Nuodeng
Yunlong 云龙 and Taijitu 太极图: Having arrived safely in Yunlong after a long and somewhat eventful journey from Xiaguan (Dali City), we set about visiting the sights and exploring the town, which to be honest doesn’t take very long, as there is precious little to see or do.
Yunlong 云龙 and Taijitu 太极图
It’s not an unpleasant place, but definitely a little dull. There’s a nice area by the river for strolling and people watching, but entertainment options and restaurants are conspicuous by their absence.
Getting to Yunlong: Every journey we made by bus in Yunnan 云南 this summer was plagued by problems. This is the account from our dairy which describes the ride we took on the 12th of August 2010, from Xiaguan (Dali City) to Yunlong.
“… We have no trouble getting a taxi this early in the morning, thank God, so we arrive at the bus station nice and early. There, we make the mistake of asking how long it will take and they tell us 5 hours, instead of the 3½ we were expecting…… more road works apparently….. We’ll just have to resign ourselves.
Getting to Yunlong
The first 40kms or so we proceed smoothly
The first 40kms or so we proceed smoothly, straight down the Dali大理– Baoshan保山 express way (an engineering marvel, hewn out of the rock face of towering mountains)，and we start wondering whether the people in the bus station have made a mistake, or whether we’ve simply misheard the times…. But no, as soon as we turn off the motorway the road basically vanishes. From now on we’ll be driving through thick red mud, along a rough track that is at times completely flooded by water running down the mountainsides. The whole area is just one great building site where we constantly have to dodge bulldozers, caterpillars and other heavy machinery, swerve around piles of construction materials, avoid the little shacks put up for the workers, and so on.
a landslide and there’s a huge rock on the road
a landslide and there’s a huge rock on the road
We have hardly started on this non-road when we come to an abrupt standstill because there has been a landslide and there’s a huge rock on the road. We’ll have to wait for a bulldozer to clear it. It doesn’t help of course that it’s absolutely pouring down with rain, again.
An Eventful Trip: Landslides, mudslides, traffic accidents, then more landslides, rock falls and even more traffic accidents. Every journey we made this summer in Yunnan seemed to involve at least one of those mishaps and sometimes several of them.
From landslides to floods, earthquakes to collapsing bridges
Watching the news in China during the rainy and typhoon season can be like watching a disaster movie that never ends. From landslides to floods, earthquakes to collapsing bridges, the whole country seems immersed in an ongoing state of calamities that sometimes verge on biblical proportions. Yet, until this year, we had always been lucky. We were either somewhere completely different, we had already been and gone, or we were about to go, but we were never actually there, on the spot. We were quite used to watching all those disasters from the comfort of our hotel room. Yet, this year it was all different.
Rescue Workers Puladi
The worst incident was the massive mudslide in Puladi near Gongshan along the Nujiang River, where a whole village was wiped off the face of the earth. Many people were killed and lots of homes were buried. We were trapped for 3 days in the nearby village of Bingzhongluo before the PLA could open the road and get us out.
