Dali!

Ahhh Dali. Though art in my heart!
After the trip from Jinghong arriving in Dali was a bit of an overload. It was the first of a couple of cities we went to that was heavily crowded by Chinese tourists. And we managed to bike straight into the worst spot of the entire city as soon as we got there. And believe me. After more than a week of something close to wilderness and desolation thousands of tourists is not an attractive sight... So I told Mikele harsh as I can be: "This fucking sucks! I can't deal with it. Let's get the fuck outta here!"
Luckily Mikele is much better at keeping calm than I am so he persuaded me to eat some food at a street stall and talk it over. I was constantly coming with negative outbursts so Mikele had two rather annoying situations on his hands there. The tourists he wasn't there with and the tourist he was there with. But damn you did good Mikele!
After eating and getting a bit used to the situation I calmed down enough to go to look for a place to stay. Of course I was still constantly hammering Mikele with how crappy the city was and how expensive the hotel would be. And of course we found a very nice cheap one...
After showering and resting our sore bums for a while we were ready to tackle the hell outside the hotel. So we went out and found out that it is very very easy to avoid the tourist masses that basically prefer to stay on one street. Food was great city was great and I started to realise that I had been a horrible pain in the ass earlier in the day. But that's how it goes I guess...
I think we ended up spending around a week in Dali. Polishing off our bargaining skills in the great nice market and in super overpriced souvenir shops. And eating endless amounts of Porkies that made the poor toilet in our room work overtime. Oh the smell in that room. Still having horrible flashbacks.
We did a few excursions out of Dali. One was to Kunming. Province capitol of Yunnan. We weren't very excited. We just wanted Dali...
But after having stayed there exceptionally long for a random stop on a bike trip we remembered that it actually was a bike trip we were doing. So we packed the bags and got ready to leave our beloved hotel and hosts.
We shall return! we said with tears in our eyes as we headed north with some xtra kilos on our bellies.

First picture in Dali. The guy who bossed the creature wanted money  for me taking the picture. I pretended not to understand...

One of Dalis city gates.

Dali trash bin.

Fooooood!

More food!!!!

Uhm yeah. Never mind.

Fermented tofu! Nice and spicy and cheeselike!

Psychedelic lady counting her gangster roll.

Funky rad moped.

Jinghong ---> Dali

We set of early-ish from Jinghong to venture further towards the Himalayas. This part of the the trip was to me the nicest not so much because of the area or the people but because we did a lot of camping in beautiful scenery.
The first day we started out following a small dusty mountain road and I think all the food and relaxation we had in Jinghong made us super heavy. So when we decided to have a lunch brake after about 40 km we were too lazy to continue. So the lunch spot turned into a camp spot.
The following many days we camped around while during the days we saw more and more long hills and random medium sized Chinese cities. I must say I really really enjoy those cities. They have nothing special to offer for tourists but they are a great insight to Chinese everyday life. And in this region of very diverse cultures it's super interesting to see how little things change from town to town. That's especially true with food and tribes people. Every town has a slight change to which tribe is dominant in the area and which food they seem to prefer...
After about 8-9 days we made it to the wonderful little city Dali at around 1900 meters above sea level.

Presumably a very fertile/virile village.

Another big bug!

The lunch spot that with the help of large amount of laziness turned into a camp spot.

The French were the first Europeans to explore the Yunnan province...

Beautiful camp spot with bath tub...

Nice with fresh cooling liquid.

Tea plantation area!

Big bong area too...

A not so nice camp spot. Asbestos hut.

Redneck preacher under a highway bridge.

One of those scary factory/chemical plant places. 

Camping on the road.

I've never been afraid to put on my nicest clothes when travelling. I think it's a shame if I only wear them to church.

Cooking at a mountain top petrol station.

A prison cell room for 2 euros per night.

Mohan ---> Jinghong

Next up was Mengla. Described as a horrible town best avoided we decided that if it wasn't for a few annoying experiences with the locals we would have liked the town. Which I guess we did but it was obscured by the incidents.
We arrived the same day we left Mohan after a short ride on a great road. With tunnels! A nice change from Thailand were tunnels are non existing. The nice change turned into a nasty change later in the trip as the tunnels got longer, narrower and darker and the traffic heavier.
In town we searched for a place to stay and here we encountered our first problem with China/Chinese. They apparently enjoy writing stuff in Chinese only... So what to do? Where's a bloody hotel? In the end after riding up and down streets Mikele overcame our fear with contacting the locals and we started entering buildings that could potentially be. Some were some were not... And some absolutely outrageously overpriced... But we found one in the end. With a roof terrace and all.
Then out to have a look around. Found a nice market and shopped a bit to cook on the roof. We also found a place with some very nice cookies that tasted a bit like pork. We named them porkies. More on them in a later post.
After eating and napping we went out to find an internet cafe. Which we did. But this was when all our troubles started...
Entering the place with everyone staring. Arriving at the counter. Trying to communicate that we wanted to use a computer. So far so good. Talking price everything went wrong though. Long story short the guy at the counter ended up half shouting half hissing: Money! Money! Money! while he did a funky kinda scary thing with his fingers. And we were outta there!
Back at the hotel we noticed that they had a room with a computer and internet access. So we asked if we could use it and we did. For half an hour or so. The connection was terrible and half the sites we wanted to access was blocked. So I went to the room and Mikele went to pay. When he came back up it was with horror in his eyes. We had been charged with the full price of the room for 24 hours!! First time we encountered Chinese business mentality. And we were a bit bummed out...
In the morning we hurried out of town but only after we found out the toilet in the room wasn't quite prepared for the meeting with Europeans. So we left them a little(BIG) present as a thanks for ripping us off.

We left town on a huge new highway recently build with shit loads of traffic so as soon as we spotted a minor road to the side of it we made it down there and what a change! Really nice scenery and close to no traffic. Up and down a lot but absolutely worth it to avoid the traffic.
We camped in a little shed in a rubber plantation. Amazing!
In the morning pushing on through more beautiful scenery and villages. The original population of this area of Yunnan is called the Dais and they have some great architecture.
I can't really remember how many days it took us to get to Jinghong but it might have just been the two.
But arriving in Jinghong was great! It is the capitol of the XishuanBanna province and they have great food and markets. We spend a few days before riding on...

Loving The Tunnels!!!

Roof terrace lunch in the rip-off hotel.

Big bong in the rip-off hotel!

A little garden next to nasty-the-river. They aren't too obsessive with ecology and such apparently...

Rubber plantation shack! Great spot!

The village roadside dump. When space gets tight somebody will "by accident" drop 10 liters of oil and a match close by. Seen all over.

Hmm. What to do next?

Example of what happens when Chinese companies goes international with the help of Google.

Entering The Middle Kingdom

Entering The Middle Kingdom

After a super rush through Laos we finally made it to the border of big ol' China. We decided to more or less just shoot through Laos to have a bit more time in China. So Laos consisted only of biking, sleeping and eating. Like most of the trip I guess but everything done a fart faster...

Just before arriving at the border there is a freaky ghost-like border town. It seems it's the Chinese that build it along with the highway we followed through Laos. But the Laotians don't really want it it seems. The town is deserted but once you're just on the other side of it a ramshackle town where all the truckers stay appears. Funny. Who gives a crap about fancy hotels and spas when you can have cardboard walls and dirt floors...
We arrived at the Chinese border post at the very last moment before they closed but nonetheless they had plenty of time to do what felt like an interrogation about our passports (especially Mikele's Italian passport that looks prehistoric). But eventually they let us enter that most Chinese country of all countries...
We then made our way into the first town (Mohan) which looked rather like the abandoned town on the other side of the border but clean and inhabited. We went to an ATM to get out money and after trying out a few we found one that was able to serve us in English and give us money at the same time... Then searching for a hotel! One place had a sign outside saying hotel (one of the few times we had that luck...) and we went in there. Zero English communication but after pointing at some signs and a few awkward moments we got a room. And what a room! Two double beds, television and a hole in the floor for dumping human waste. We were amazed about the cheap price and the quality the money got us! And the same goes for the restaurant we went to. Somehow we ended up with 5 different dishes and a bucket of rice and we feared the moment we had to pay the bill. But when it came we were very happy to see that the price of two very very stretched stomachs was only around 8 euros. First feast of MANY in China.
In the morning we went out to experience our first Chinese market and we absolutely loved it! Eating Chinese doughnuts with soy milk and noodle soup. Mmmmm. Great start! And we weren't harassed or anything! Even better... So we went back to the hotel and packed up to venture further inland...

 Crossing into Laos on a boat.

An American guy called Elliott that showed us how to make a pipe out of an apple.

 Abandoned building on the Lao side of the border. 

Oooh. So close...

...so scary!

Lao side of the border. I think the idea was that the road should run through the monument there but in the rush they didn't get to connect the two bits on either side so there's a dirt track running around the side of it...

The Chinese border/interrogation building.

The hotel room!

The first feast!!! (in China that is. We had plenty in Thailand...)

MikkelMikele outlawed in The Peoples Republic of China!

Dear friends and others. It seems that the Chinese government had sniffed out our blog which being read by such a huge amount of people posed a great threat to internal stability. Therefore they decided to act on their fear that we would publish unsubstantiated filth about their way of governing and banned the blog even before we entered the country. This has been a very distressful time for us since we really just wanted to share our holiday pictures of us in shorts and sandals while Europe was covered with a blanket of snow. Of course there is no fun in that anymore as all the snow in Europe is gone and here it's too hot to be comfortable even without shorts and sandals. So when all the pictures are sorted out and we managed to lose the last of the chinese security agents trailing us we'll tell a little bit about our round trip in Yunnan Province, China.

Cheers

ps. Some people try to reduce the importance of MikkelMikele by spreading the rumour that all blogspot blogs are banned in China - along with Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and numerous of other potentially harmful sites. We believe this is a rumour started by the Chinese government to try to lower the global respect around MikkelMikele. In other words - Do not believe such nonsense!