Last days in China

Wow, we have been in China a month! It is such an enormous country. Just this province of Yunnan is the size of France. Getting anywhere takes a lot of time. We spent a few days in what is known as ancient Dali, hired bikes and cycled all day down one side of the lake, through the little villages, all surrounded by huge agricultural areas, co-operatives I think. So many people working in the fields. The enormous amount of food this country needs each day is difficult to imagine, it is really cheap as well so the people growing it must get paid very little.  The rural people are very poor and work all hours of the day and.night. Not a lot of leisure time. But it is nice seeing the old men sit around playing ma jong and cards in the evenings and the women dancing. The little kids r cute they all say hello really loud and then giggle. I think the photos of Dali are on the last blog, there was kilometres of fish (whitebait?) being dried on the road on top of shade cloth. Onto Kunming then another few hours south to see the swallows cavern near Jinshui. Thousands of swallows live here and migrate south each year.  The cavern is 8 km long, about 1 km open to the public. Big stalactites & stalacmites. We walked inside for about an hour. Pretty impressive inside. Huge. The photo of the entrance is quite deceiving.   There is shopping and food places 1 km inside and music and lights... Then a boat takes you back out. Only in China! Jianshui was a nicer smaller place. Great street food. Then a four hour bus ride back to kunming, a 5 hour wait and then we took a sleeper bus 9 hours south to Jinghong. Photo of Trevor in sleeper. It was pretty good. I slept well. Only problem was it made good time and arrived at 5 am it was still dark until 6.30 and it was pouring with rain! It has been raining all day and night. We are heading to the China/Laos border this morning, all going well will be in Luang Nam Tha tonight.  Si chien China it's  been a great experience.