Gasp! That there'd be blue sky!

Now this is more like it. We survived our 13-hour hard sleeper journey from Chengdu to Panzhihua and are about halfway through an 8-hour bus ride to Lijiang in the Yunnan province.

We've heard good things about this part of China and things are looking promising already. The bus is weaving its way through green valleys that look nothing like the industrial wasteland we've come to expect in China. The sky is a clear blue and the sun is shining.

If we could just get the bus driver to turn off the Chinese music that's blaring out of the TV and get the guy puking in the back to keep it down, we'd be in business.