A big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the lovely Sarah for Saturday 2 April. And what a fantastic birthday it was for the poor girl. We crawled out of bed at 6am in the below-freezing predawn and boarded a rickety old bus with a bunch of staring old Tibetans. Then it was over ten hours of rattling through the mountains over what they optimistically refer to as a road. Although I feel that a collection of potholes the size of olympic swimming pools connected by rocks hardly deserves that title. There were times when for hours on end we had to cling for dear life to the seat in front of us just to avoid being thrown into the aisle.
The kamikaze busdriver apparently thought the conditions were ideal however because every time he'd see another vehicle on the horizon he'd become enraged and press the accelerator to the floor until he'd manage to bounce us past the insolent car/truck/rickshaw/tractor - usually overtaking around blind corners along the crumbling edge of a cliff over a raging river (maybe he was related to Huffy?) But he took the excellent safety measure of sounding his horn continuously throughout the ten hour journey. Just when I thought our senses were completely overloaded, he switched on the TV and played awful video-hits DVDs of Tibetan Michael Bolton lookalikes wailing and screeching at FULL VOLUME which literally caused us physical pain. Jamming ear-plugs in, I managed to stem the eardrum bleeding and hopefully averted any permanent hearing damage. Obviously we seemed a little too comfortable, so everyone on the bus decided to light cigarettes...
We finally made it back to Chengdu and fell out of the bus in a heap. I'm not kidding, my bum was completely numb for at least three hours afterwards.
But Sarah's birthday improved somewhat when we found a nice hotel room with an amazing shower and then went out for dinner to a beautiful Thai restaurant and sat in the rooftop garden overlooking the river in the warm evening munching Pad Thai and sipping red wine. Happy birthday sweetheart, I promise next year will be better! (no more than 9 hours on a bus...)
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Happy birthday Sarah! Hey, at least it's one you'll never forget. It sounds as if you guys are having an amazing time and I am way jealous. Although I did have a similar experience to your panda cuddling last night, Mike, when the enormous Max the cat, one of my new flatmates, slept on my pillow last night next to my head. Keep up the happy travelling!
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