The road from Songpan was maybe the most beautiful but also the most difficult I’ve ever travelled. The 320 km bus ride is supposed to take around ten hours, but the road, which snakes through the mountains of northern Sichuan and eventually passes through Wenchuan, the epicentre of the 2008 earthquake, is still being rebuilt, so going was slow. The bus left Songpan at 7 am and eventually rolled into Chengdu around midnight, 17 hours later.
Despite the remote location, people in Songpan told us about how quickly help arrived when the earthquake hit – by the next morning, tents and food and been flown in, and foreigners who had been resting after their horse treks when the earthquake hit got discounted tickets on flights out from a nearby airport within a week. By the time we were there, most of the towns and villages we passed through seemed to have been rebuilt — in Wenchuan there were no hints that this has been the epicentre of an earthquake that killed more than 68 000 people.
Rebuilding the road through the mountains and valleys seems to be a much more difficult task. The dirt road that stands in for now was clearly not designed for buses, and in places disappears into a muddy slush. But our bus, the Golden Dragon, fought on bravely. The ride came with sound-effects: “Waaaaah” went the passengers as we passed a tipped-over PetroChina truck; “Waaaaah” as we stood by the side of the road and saw the bus gain a deep dent in its front fender as it struggled out of a particularly deep ditch; “Waaaah” as we drove over what can only be described as a waterfall. At one point, the bus’s engine gave up, but half an hour or so of prodding from the driver convinced it to struggle on. Most of our time seemed to be spent in “traffic jams”, places where long lines of trucks stood waiting to slowly pass by a particularly difficult section of road.
There was one rest stop, and then a little after 7 pm we finally stopped for food, the first bite to eat our driver had had for at least 12 hours. But life has to go on and tourist money has to keep coming in, and so he and the bus will have to turn around and do the whole journey again. Hopefully he had a chance to rest in Chengdu before the time came for the Golden Dragon to start the journey back.
Traffic jam