Mekong River Flophouse to Somewhere before Lincang - 19km

Hoping I would be free of the quarry in around 10km, the horrible dusty conditions continued on and on, with more road blocks and stubborn construction foremen to deal with. Thankfully after another hour and half of this, some guy in a pickup stopped and motioned he could take me to Lincang. Rather generous guy, after dropping me at a hotel, he also gave me some water and didn't want any money for the ride. The bike was utterly filthy, dust covered everything, and had no doubt clagged the bearings in my old fashioned headset. I cleaned it all up as best as I could but later decided it probably wouldn't even last till Japan at this rate, so tｈｅ next day I took a sleeper bus to Kunming, with plans of  a sleeper train to Shanghai and then flight to Japan. The bicycle travel coupling was indispensible for this exercise.

Regarding the train connection, my timing couldn't have possibly been worse. It was the end of the Spring Festival, a time when most Chinese are returning home from visiting relatives. It is considered to be the largest annual human migration, with around 180million people coming and going on trains. Kunming station was like nothing I have ever dealt with before, it was so, so crowded and filthy. Thankfully the internal waiting rooms periodically emptied, and the toilets werent as dire as the outside ones, where hundreds of  familes were huddled under doonas, or lying on flattened boxes awaiting trains. These makeshift campgrounds seem to be a fallout of the crowd control system. It works such that you cant enter the enormous internal waiting areas without a valid ticket within that day, hence the campouts.

My own abrupt change of plans meant I hadn't the time to book a train ticket prior to departure, so the only tickets left were in the most expensive class. The skinflint in me didn't appreciate this at the time of purchase, but I later realised this was definately a blessing in disguise as the train was filled to capacity. The soft sleeper births were a haven of peace for what was nearly a 2 day journey.