Arriving in Jinjiang at 12.20pm, we are hustled straight onto a waiting bus bound for Lijiang. On the train we had made friends with a Dutch couple, Ron and Yvonne, and the four of us now bundle our packs onto the back seat of a bus and settle into the cramped seats. Before the bus leaves, a couple of young capitalists sell us water and bread for the journey, and at 1pm the bus roars out of the compound in front of the railway station.
The road follows the left bank of the river for a few kilometres, passing a giant box-girder railway bridge, across which we had recently come, and a construction site where the pillars of another railway bridge were being constructed. Leaving the main river, we follow a tributary river up through the brown hills. Dusty concrete cities line the river, and a lot of new buildings are being erected at the foot of each cluster of box-like multi-storey apartments. Rough shacks cling precariously to the riverbank, dwellings for those that can’t afford the more palatial residences above.
For several hours the road winds up through ranges of hills which are at once spectacular in their beauty and appalling in the way they are being despoiled by heavy industry. The air is thick with a dense pall of heavy smog emanating from the steel mills, cement factories, asphalt factories and mills that appear to exist only to produce smoke.
The landscape is almost Dickensian in appearance, like some vision of Eastern Europe in its darker industrial moments. It is spectacular in an awful way, and it’s readily apparent that this area is being poisoned in the pursuit of economic development. Along a thousand metre front above a brown river, molten metal slag is being poured down the steep riverbanks. For what purpose, I can’t tell. The molten slag glows bright orange as it cascades down the hundred metre bank, sending up clouds of brown and black smoke. The scene is reminiscent of the movie Total Recall, with its steep scree of clinkers, brown air, and molten metal. It seems almost inconceivable that people could pollute their living space in such a way.
Further up the valley, what appears to be a cement works and, just opposite, an asphalt factory, belch smoke. The cement works pours out a dense cloud of brownish-white coal smoke, while the asphalt factory emits black, oily smoke and a flare of burning gas. Around this place the crops are dying, the grass is dying, the trees are dying, all coated in a choking layer of brown dust. The people, too, must surely be dying, their bodies slowly filling with heavy metals and carcinogens.
At each locality, the bus stops to pick up more people, until it is jammed full. Most of the passengers are local peasants, with vacant, uncomprehending expressions. They squabble over the seats, then sit resolutely amongst their baggage, spitting onto the floor.
Mid-afternoon, the bus breaks down. This doesn’t come as any surprise to us, as virtually every traveller we have talked about has a story about a broken-down bus en route to Lijiang. The breakage seems suspiciously like a seized-up engine to me, but the driver cheerfully begins tinkering with it, and appears confident he can fix it. For our part, Linda, Yvonne, Ron, and I just sit on the side of the road, drinking beer and eating a tin of Spam, which I purchase from a small store beside which we have stopped. We try to flag down the occasional passing vehicle, but nothing stops.
After an hour or so, the driver somehow manages to free up the engine, which still won’t fire as it is now flooded. But after another half an hour of pushing, however, we get it going and continue on our way. As the sun sets, we climb up through an intricately-terraced valley, where the red of the sunset is reflected in small paddies filled with water, and smoke from cooking fires drifts lazily upward as people wend their way home from the fields.
After dark, we bounce for hours in the bus, finally arriving in Lijiang at 12.30am. We try several hotels, all of which are full, but eventually end up at the Sun Hotel, where small but comfortable rooms are ￥20 each.
CurseOfTheTraveller 