My habit each morning is to get up at about 7 o'clock, give Marilyn a coffee in bed, then spend an hour or so watching YouTube videos. Mindless, I know but there's a big world out there and Youtube is probably my best option to experience it. This morning I found myself watching a video of a bus trip from Sichuan province in north-west China up to Tibet. I don't know why I opened this particular video but I'm glad I did. It was on a modern double-decker bus, it had no commentary, but the pictures of the unfolding environment was breathtaking. For most of it, the bus travelled along a river and the water was the most extraordinary green colour. I gather this is because the water is melted snow. Everywhere looked very prosperous and my long-held beliefs that China was a land of poor peasants living on a bowl of rice a day was severely shattered.
The Chinese infrastructure is remarkable. In this relatively remote area of the country, thousands of kilometres from the capital, the roads, bridges, tunnels and so on were all world class. We didn't see any trains but I know they are the envy of the world. If I can take just one message from these videos it is that there is an awful lot of concrete in China.
In our travels, we only spent two days and one night in China but we hired a car and driver so were able to see the Great Wall and the Forbidden Palace and quite a bit more but I regret now that we didn't go back: 'so much to do, so little time'. I wonder who said that!
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