Sunday 20 September 2015

Luxury holes in the ground.

Today's destination was Songpan, and we headed there without knowledge of what hotel we had to stay at ... just the name of a good restaurant ! Blind faith, or poor organisation ...probably both !

Must be cold staying in a tent in the winter.

No idea what this is all about (a shop, I think)

Empty roads.

Decent scenery.

Think this is a Chinese graveyard.

Stopped for gas & a pee ... luxury: a tiled hole in the ground !
The villagers make money selling horse rides to the city folks !

High up ... and therefore cold, despite the sunshine.

Yak traffic jam. Everyone just pushes their way through.

Made a mental allowance for the wrong co-ordinates, found the restaurant, met Emma ...

... and eat a Yak burger while waiting for our guide to send the correct co-ordinates for the hotel.
Which it turned out, we had already driven past. Grrr.

The boardwalk into the city had been washed away...
...so we had to walk in along the the road. Life in your hands job, it was.

No idea what this came from.

Yaks penis .... lovely !

The old walled town of Songpan...

... was now getting a little too touristy !
The Swiss lads had again decided to take a "scenic route" and arrived at the hotel some 5 hours after us, much to Abdul's annoyance.  But we re-grouped and walked back to Emma's Kitchen for our evening meal, but that was that.   All back to bed by 8pm, and I had still not spotted anywhere else to go for that final beer.

And yet again, this was another hotel which chose not to turn the heating on.  There was a glimmer of hope that seeing a switch on the air conditioning marked as "heat/cool", maybe it worked in reverse... but alas, after three hours on max heat, we got the room temp up a few degrees to 17 C.

After a cool night, it was only in the morning, did I discover a massive Karaoke bar behind the hotel... didn't think of looking there.