9 NOVEMBER 2006

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Pan Ling to Wannian to Wuhan

Yet another sunny morning develped from the cold of the night. We were up slightly later than usual, especially Zhanghai who had been on a 4am caving sortie into the showcave with Chen Lixin and Zheng to film the pretty gour pools in the final chamber at the far end of the cave found 2 day's earlier. ZH did not look rested and was understandably rather quiet.

An hour later, Arthur Clarke turned up with Niu and her students, Janey and Joe. The lads from Jiangxi TV left in their Taliban waggon for Nanchang. These included Zheng from the university outdoor club and Mr. Tang (bandanna man) the cameraman who had worked really hard in the cave keeping pace with us whilst we moved rapidly onward.







We packed the bags into a hired Ford transit mini-bus and waved goodbye to Mr. Chui the showcave director and his staff and our friends including Celine, Li Juan (who had looked after us so attentively over our stay). The relatively short trip (25km) to Wannian followed the bumpy and very dusty road to the town. The road passes a huge area of limestone quarrying that is responsible for coating the local inhabitants with choking dust. There are a number of lime kilns en route that belch black coal smoke into the atmosphere. The turning out of Wannian is posted with a billboard for the cave and it sees likely that this unmade road will soon be black-topped to encourage more visitors to the showcave. We stopped at the government hotel and changed buses. To make more space, Joe with his box of cave crickets left us an returned by train to Wuhan. We seemed less fortunate with a long 7 hour drive ahead of us to reach the same destination. We were glad to stop for lunch in a small town further north where we were able to grab a few beers for the journey ahead. A couple of stops were made for fuel allowing us to stretch our legs and 'water the horse'. The petrol stations in China often have incredibly large canopies and dozens of eager uniformed staff who take great interest in seeing rare western travellers and getting the opportunity to practice a little English.




New highways and development zones stretch for miles


Barges line a tributary of the Yangtzee

We arrived on the outskirts of Wuhan in the dark at about 6.30pm and our weary driver seemed to be suddenly very accident prone as we made erratic u-turns and stops in the busy rush hour traffic. We were essentially lost, not surprising since Wuhan is a gigantic city of 3 merged towns which is undergoing rapid highway expansion. Eventually Niu and Janey got us back on track and we passed the familiar "Yellow Crane Tower" tourist attraction that we had visited on our earlier arrival in Wuhan with Professor Yan. On the other sideof the Yangtzee river bridge, we dropped of Niu and picked up XXXX who guided us for another hour across town to the Geosciences University campus where we were shown to our accomodation on site.


Wannian street

After an evening meal outside the campus, we returned to our rooms to enjoy the first bit of time to ourselves since the trip began. Within a sort time there was a knock at the door and Prof Yan appeared dragging us out of bed and onto the street for soe late night beers. Well, you only live once!