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Yunnan college girl’s way home -- an 'odyssey' no more

Updated:2018-01-26 10:43:21   english.yunnan.cn

Reading tip:  Yunnan is a mountainous province, and its socio-economic progress used to be limited by poor transport facilities. People aspires to build more roads. At the backdrop of the on-going Yunnan Lianghui/Two Sessions, we have a special review of the changes happened in the province in the past five years. The changes will be shown in seven personal stories and more. Here is the second story on build-up of roads, highways, and others:

Lu’s “odyssey”

Lu Zhengyuan is a junior at Kunming University of Science and Technology. In the years of 2016-17, she was anxious about going home when vacations came. It was a long way. 

Her home is located in the Changputang village of Wumulong Township, southwest Yunnan’s Lingcang City. And here is one of her home journeys in 2016. 

To go home, Lu had to leave Chengogng (where the university lies) at 7:00 am that day. She took the subway and changed to a bus to get to the Kunming West Coach Station, where she got a coach ticket to Lincang City around two hours later.

It is about 500 kilometers from Kunming to Lincang. The bus first took her to Dali City, and then entered Lincang from Xiangyun County. It took her eight hours to cover the 500 km.

At 17:00, Lu arrived in Lincang and in a hurry she changed to another bus bound for Wumulong Township. It is 200 kilometers, but due to poor road condition, it would take her another four hours to reach Wumulong.

Lu ate a little takeaway food, tired, and she used the bus time for a nap. She knew a shaking motorcycle ride was waiting for her from the township to her village, and after that she need to walk for quite a while to finally reach home…

When going home again in 2017, however, Lu Zhengyuan found that things changed.

The Lincang-Wumulong road improved a lot, and the bus trip was shortened to around two hours from four hours in the past. The township-village path was cemented, and the motorcycle-ride got much safer.

Now, Lu is no longer afraid of returning home for family reunion during vacations. What she wishes most is that the Yuxi-Lincang highway could be completed soon, so that her home journey can be further shortened by three hours. 

Keywords:   College girl home odyssey