A long day of driving 270 miles up and down increasingly high mountain ridges. The weather got cooler as the altitude increased and the nature of the countryside changed from sub-tropical to mountain with high peaks covered in small shrubs. The agriculture consisted increasingly of maize with smaller amounts of sugar cane and rice and the beautiful tea plantations ceased to exist.
About midday, we crossed a huge bridge across the river which eventually flows through Burma into Vietnam where it is called the Mekong, and eventually empties into the South China Sea through the Mekong Delta.
Lijiang is a major tourist resort and was extremely busy when we arrived. Green set her satnav to avoid traffic and took us down a single track street in the sector of the old city inhabited by the Naxi people with their distinctive costume with a large wide cross on the front of their jackets. It was misery, especially when a car came the other way, but the driver was very helpful and we emerged unscathed. We found a very cheap carpark adjacent to the old city.
