A ten hour bus trip form the WWII capital of China, Chung Ching (重庆) to Le Shan (乐山). It took 14 hours. The highlights:
- We put our back packs over the rust holes in the floor to make it less windy inside.
- There were chickens in cages on the roof in cages.
- We passed over a bridge under construction over a very deep (greater than 10 meter deep) ravine with a fast flowing river at the bottom. The bridge had planks running along it, making a path like those old two strip concrete drive ways. The planks were less than half a meter wide. The people walking across the bridge, including a woman with a babe in arms walked, out to the ends of the bridge’s cross beams to allow the bus past. I would have fallen off.
- The farmer in the rice paddies wearing shorts and tshirt up to his knees in water in the middle of winter.
- Travelling through rolling hills I saw some aqueducts. They were unlike and I had seen before. They were big, much wider than say the roman ones. Not as high as the terrain did not require them to be high. They were well made of well cut black stone. Quite unlike what I was used to seeing in China or anywhere else for that matter.
- Sitting a few rows in front of us was a very old man. He spoke to another man on the fighting he did as a soldier in the Chinese civil war. Though I never understood enough to know which side he had fought on. About 10 hours into our bus trip we stopped and they unloaded a lot of stuff off the roof of the bus. The conductor told the old man and his colleague that they had to get off. The men were furious. They said that they had bought tickets to a particular town, that now turned out not to be on the bus route. The conductor said that they were already 3 hours late and could not go up that town. Still they argued. The conductor got off the bus. The men chased him. By the side of the road, the men picked up a stick and stones and started violently attacking the conductor. I thought, this is it. The conductor will die and we will never get to our destination on this bus. The driver raced over to break up the fight. After another short, heated argument, he overrode the conductor and agreed to go to the town. With every one back on thr bus, the driver drove like a crazed maniac to the town. I thought that the conductor had lied to them as they always had lied to us. The bus had never been going there. They just lied to get the men on the bus and get their fare. I felt a bit happier as it turned out that the conductors and drivers were lying to everyone, not just us foreigners.
- We arrived into to Le Shan about 4 hours late.