Hello everyone,
Most of you probably know about this trip we have been planning, but I wanted to put together a more thorough request for road/sight recommendations. We finally bought a car - a 2009 2WD Changfeng/Mitsubishi Pajero. We're still working on paperwork and will probably have the car in hand in a few days. We expect to be leaving for our 2-3 month road trip through central and western China in about 7-10 days. Our main goal is to better understand China by traveling through the geography, meeting and staying with people and generally by observing everyday life.
Many of you have been incredibly helpful in our exploratory phase (thank you), so we're reaching out again once more. We've done a great deal of planning ourselves, but we've had quite a bit of trouble identifying good roads, etc. We also feel personal recommendations are always better than guide books, etc. When we started planning our trip we weren't going to have a full itinerary, but it's been recommended to us that in China this will be really helpful. So we're looking for route recommendations. Below is bunch of specifics to guide this route.
BACKGROUND
We've studied 10 weeks of intensive Mandarin between this year and last. In Kunming we can generally make ourselves understood even if we're missing a key piece of vocabulary, but listening is harder. We can read menus pretty well, soap opera dialogue, and anything else with simple grammar/words. We have our Chinese drivers licenses and are in the process of registering our car.
We have driven and road-tripped in a lot in other countries, including a month-long motorcycle trip in India last year. So we're familiar with the kind of traffic/road obstacles we'll encounter. We're also familiar with the kind of planning, preparation and risks involved with such an ambitious trip. We like to camp, cook our own food, etc. We have emergency beacons, water filters, and various other survival / safety equipment, and so on.
OUR GOALS
During this road trip we want to see: geography, culture, agriculture/cultivation and food harvesting/preparation, and the daily life and customs of people who live outside the cities.
OUR PLAN
We plan on leaving in the next 7-10 days from Kunming, and would really love to get a starting itinerary (e.g. the first few provinces). We're generally looking for a route that covers the best smaller roads, scenery, and interesting counties. In some we'll stop to explore the local roads - and possibly stay in a local village or two - before getting on our main route again. We usually don't travel on highways/expressways or through cities unless we really just want to go from A to B quickly. We prefer to go slowly, follow our curiosity and allow for chance encounters. That said, we still prefer to travel on good, safe roads wherever possible. We plan to avoid tourist sites except for a few highly recommended places.
The main provinces we plan on visiting are Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Sichuan. We also really want to drive through Qinghai, Gansu, maybe Xinjiang and maybe Tibet. In the first provinces we will go more slowly, staying with people and exploring. In the other provinces, we were planning on spending more time on the road. What we're looking for is 1.5 months worth of driving that will probably take 2-3 months to do. We have budgeted for around 20,000 kilometers.
We plan on staying in small hotels, with locals, and camping in a tent or in the back of the car occasionally. We generally stick to three rules of road travel - no driving at night, in cities, or bad weather. We know this slows down travel, but we feel it mitigates a lot of the risk.
WHAT WE WANT TO SEE:
* Mountains, high plains, rivers (especially deltas), forests, geological formations and desert
* Smaller and more scenic routes in place of highways
* As much traditional agriculture as we can find - plantations (tea, etc.), animal farms, wild-harvesting, rice terracing, orchards, growing grains, fishing
* We'd love to follow around some folks while they wild forage for foods, while they process soy beans into tofu, while they make barley wine, while they bake their clay pots, etc.
* Craft-making, especially pottery, textiles and traditional food production
* Old silk route, tea horse road, etc
* Great wall - the older, more genuine parts, not the touristy reconstructed parts
* Market towns and trading in general
* Ethnic minority places, especially where they still do things traditionally - craft, food production, etc
* Places where we can hike
WHAT WE WANT TO AVOID:
* Large and even medium-sized cities wherever possible
* Most large tourist sites - we'd like to pick out only a sampling that are exceptional
* Roads frequented by truck / trade routes wherever possible
* We have been told to avoid border areas, but if there are certain areas that are near a border worth seeing, we'd like to know
QUESTIONS:
1 - Can anyone recommend a high level strategy for visiting the provinces? Which order, weather considerations, etc? At the high level, we are either going to do a large loop (e.g. starting and ending in Kunming), or an open-jawed trip, in which case we'd sell our car in the final city. Which do you think would be better?
2 - Within each province, we'd love as much detail as you can provide about roads and sights. We've pinpointed sights, but haven't been able to find things outside of guidebooks, especially on which roads to take.
3 - We know the rainy season is starting, so we are assuming it's best to see Yunnan and Guanxi first. Does this make sense?
4 - For language, we're planning on getting fixers where we need them, especially in the west and any remote places where people will not speak Mandarin. We are favoring taking this as it comes, but if you have recommendations please let us know. Where do you think the accents will be hardest to understand.
5 - Do you recommend any other forums / places where we can post this same information?
Many thanks!
