29th April – Yichang to Jingdezhen

Today we have a big driving day of approximately 680 km so we have an early start at 7 am.  It’s important that we don’t stop for long but we do need regular stops to get out of the car, have a stretch, visit the toilet, buy fuel & eat.  Our first stop is to refuel and the service centre looks to be carrying out a training session.

Today is the start of the 1^st May Labour Day holiday celebrations, so the tolls are free!  Lucky for us as it would’ve been a very expensive day otherwise. It’s great to be able to drive straight through and apart from saving us money it also saves us a lot of time.

There are many trucks on the road and top date we haven’t seen any B doubles, they are just very long trucks and usually loaded to the limit.  The car carriers are extremely long they can carry 14 medium cars, 7 up & 7 down.  The last car on the bottom sits out over the back axle on the ramp.

We drive over some magnificent bridges and cross the Yangtze river 3 times.

The highway systems are fantastic with smooth interchanges to other highways, which makes bypassing large cities like Wuhan quick & easy.  We do glimpse interesting sites even driving on these types of fast motorways.

Although all of the cars ran faultlessly all day we did manage to loose 2 cars on one of the highway interchanges.  Burgundy & Ginger exited when they should’ve continued straight ahead, an issue with radios not being be all that clear at this particular time.  The rest of the group pulled over and waited for about 20 minutes while the 2 cars went back on provincial roads and joined back onto the highway they had just left and rejoined us.

We arrive at our hotel in Jingdezhen at about 5 pm which we are happy about.  The drive into town is a lot less frenetic than last night thank goodness.  The road leading into the city is lovely & wide & all the lamp posts have blue & white china decorating them as this town is the place for china, in particular porcelain, in China.

Even the roundabout has a magnificent pottery piece of art in the middle of it.

After a fabulous BBQ meal in a Muslim restaurant we walk into town, first crossing a bridge that has many gorgeous bronze statues of potters depicted in different aspects of making china.  The city although only small is vibrant & bustling with the buildings along the river lit up.