After several days the snow thawed enough for the roads to be deemed safe!
We took a car all the way back to Youxian, where we had lunch at Li Ji’s mother’s house, and got the bus in the evening. The road trip from Caobo was amazing, with clear weather giving us stunning mountain views; no pictures though because using both hands to hold on to the car frame as we raced around the curling mountain roads.
The bus ride back to Shenzhen was extremely bumpy. We took C-class country roads most of the way for over 12 hours because the expressway was (still after 2 weeks) one solid traffic jam, and we just weaved around it lurching along on these pot-holed tracks. Back in Shenzhen we experienced restored brain function as the temperature was 18 degrees C… but in SZ that is still cold enough to have most of the residents shivering in full coats, hats, and gloves.