OK, I know this is two in one day, but this event just has to be reported. Tour day was today. The Mausoleum is what you would expect...a lot of stairs and not much when you get to the top -:) There was one amazing event today, however....
As part of the afternoon tour, we were taken over the Nanjing bridge over the ChangChang (Yankze) river. The bridge is over 1.5km long. Impressive as it was, it was not nearly as impressive as the lengths the organisation went to to ensure smooth passage for the ARDF bus cavalcade. bicycle peak hour traffic was halted over the bridge for us to have exclusive access (we're talking like trying to block the Sydney Harbour bridge here). We wound from one side of the road to the other, a line of about 15 buses with multiple police car escorts. Traffic was stopped in one direction or the other based on where we happened to be with other squads of police cars. Any cars getting in the way of our official speedy transit were blasted with the extremely serious horn on our bus (we happened to be in the lead bus behind the two police cars).
This was amazing enough, but at the far end we left the highway, did an odd U turn in a nearby road, and then proceeded do it all again back over the bridge in the other direction. I have some pictures of all this, but it doesn't really capture the amazement we felt about the whole operation. The bridge itself tended to be secondary -:) The police escort, with sirens blazing, then led us into the middle of downtown Nanjing, the whole caboodle into a pedestrian only zone into the middle of the market for our dinner in a nearby restaurant.
Anyway, 80m tommorrow so I'm off to bed.
Bruce ----------------------------------------------------------------- --------
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