Yesterday evening they first wanted 50 Yuan for the room. Subsequently we settled on 20 Yuan. That was before I knew that I was going to be in a room with glass doors without any curtains and that there was no shower. The toilets were similar to the ones in the first motel in China that I stayed in. Anyway, by then I agreed on 20 which was OK anyway and I didn’t necessarily need to shower tonight.

In the morning, however, they wanted 50 Yuan, which I of course refused to pay, as by then I knew that the meal could not have cost 30 Yuan. So at the end we settled on 20 Yuan for the room and 10 Yuan for the food. That sounded fair enough to me. The guy from the tollgate that got me into this place kept saying that they all wanted to help me but with the initial requests for ridiculous payments it felt more like they wanted to help themselves. Anyway, it was not too hard to bring them to reasonable prices and I guess they might as well try if this foreigner is green enough to give them twice the money than the service is worth. I’m sure I could have gotten the room for 10 Yuan if I really wanted but I was not in the mood to push it this far.

Otherwise today the ride was pretty much uneventful, only very long. I thought that I would reach Guilin (my next important destination to see) but I’m still not there. It feels like I’m never going to get there. I’ve planned to spend two, maximum three days riding there from Kunming, but it’s already been 6 days since I left Kunming.

I could have done (and planned to) more kilometers today even though I didn’t get back to the expensive highway in favor of the “old” road with rare tollgates that motorbikes seems to be allowed to pass without any payment (even this rule has some exceptions though, which basis I have so far failed to identify). However, the “everywhere” present new highway construction made long parts of the current road a pretty rough and sometimes muddy ride. Such sections usually seem to last for about 30 kilometers which seems to be the standard length on which they seem to wield concurrent work. There was also about 50 kilometers of unsealed road through another few peaks of this enormous mountain range. If the road was not following the curve that the GPS was showing so exactly I would not believe that I was actually on the right road as this was the first time in about 1500 km in China that I encountered an unsealed road. It was not too bad at all – that is if all hell didn’t break out about 50 meters before this road started… Thanks to heavy rain and strong wind gusts I had to go really slowly.

Although my elevation is still generally dropping down I still haven’t been under 600 meters.

Just when I decided to start looking for some place to stay before dark I was passing by a place that looked like a hotel so I asked. On a second look it actually seemed to be more of a “old people's home” than a hotel since the guys I asked were even thinking about a price for the room to tell me, the room has no key to it and all the other inhabitants seem to be over 70 years old, but I don’t mind as long as it is reasonably clean and safe. And although there was no key to lock the room with there was also no other buildings for kilometers, and being robbed by the oldies I didn’t fear. The room was for 20 Yuan again but after I saw it I felt confident enough to request 15, which I got. I then had a dinner for mere 5 Yuan. It was a noodle soup where there was 4 times more of the Chinese flat rice noodles than water and it also contained 2 fried eggs, some meat and fried peanuts. Even after missing a lunch today I had big trouble to finish this enormous bowl of noodles. It was also one of the tastiest meals I had in China so far.

(462 km)