Waiting for the bus from Shenzhen to Youxian. Jenny sporting an eye infection, but I enjoyed claiming that husbands should beat their wives.
Huanggang: it can't really be called a bus station since it is just the area where the old town was bulldozed, concreted over, with permacrowds.
KFC provided pre-trip sustenance.
Lie-down bus. Good to be near the front due to increased leg room. However you get 10 hours of cigarette fumes from the driver. And Jenny had to put up with the reserve driver's non-stop cellphone call to his girlfriend begging her to marry him all the way there. I always think there are a lot of benefits to not understanding Chinese.
Arrival in Youxian at about 5am
We got a friend of a friend to give us a car ride from Youxian to Caobo. At one point the road was so bumpy the bumper half fell off.
They fixed it with string...
...no thanks whatsoever to Mr hopeless foreigner.
Hong Yung's truck
We took the truck as if it was a car to nip over to the neighbouring towns to visit his family.
Great views of the road from being so high up in the truck
Early motorbike training
The classic Chinese countryside improvised ink-squid tractor.
Waking up at 4am to catch the bus from Caobo to Zhuzhou.
Mum and Dad got up too and saw us onto the bus. Don't believe the clock, it was 4.30am!
On the way back we took a taxi from Zhuzhou to Changsha, then flew from Changsha airport to Shenzhen. Note the pretentious world times map, even though Changsha has no international flights.
We arrived 5 hours before our flight. MMMM borrrring.
Picture interesting for the apparently wheel-less airport buses in the background.
The airport wifi didn't work, of course, so thank goodness for PSP!
The flight itself took about an hour. Travelling to the airport from Caobo and waiting in the airport, plus getting home from the airport in Shenzhen, made the trip a total of 21 hours. Chinese new year travel - millions of Chinese all moving around at the same time - is one of those things where, logically, you should say "never again"... and yet you HAVE to do it every year. And it's great fun... as long as it's in retrospect.
The End!