Site Report: Detian Waterfall

Visits

• 2013-01-11: The Sleeping Bag. This was going to be the last day in China before heading off to Vietnam. For our last hurrah, we decided to hire a car and driver for the day to check out a waterfall that looked especially nice (in the photos, anyway). It was quite a challenge to communicate what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go. After getting several people involved, the driver that the hotel called for us gave us the angry/you are crazy/why me look, and then he quoted us a fairly high price for the day. So, off we went to look at some hills and waterfalls. The drive from Chongzuo to the waterfalls was through some spectacular scenery. The mountains in this area look like they belong on some other planet. After a couple of hours hoping we were actually going to the waterfall, we arrived. The Detian Waterfall is listed as the fourth largest waterfall on an international border in the world, but it wasn't really all that exciting. We wandered around a bit, and we even managed to illegally enter Vietnam as well as inadvertently take a bunch of possibly prohibited photographs. I don't think the police around here wanted to get into a discussion in the English language, however, and anyway, the photos were just birds. On the way to the real China/Vietnam border, we came around a corner to the scene of a recent road accident. There was a truck full of sticks with a big dent in the front, and then there was some guy who had stopped that truck, from a motorbike, with his head. We got out of the car to try and help, but the victim was in bad shape with a good pint or two of blood on the road as well as some pink fluid leaking out of his eye sockets. I was pretty sure that he was going to die right there in front of me. I thought it might help with the shock symptoms to keep the guy warm, and it was decided to use one of our pretty new fancy sleeping bags to cover him. We waited around for the ambulance for probably an hour. I felt very strange being the medical expert for this event as I don't even have proper first aid training. In the meantime, some other people came around, and a tour bus for the waterfall even stopped for some photo opportunities. A mini-van that passes as an ambulance finally showed up, and they took the guy AND our sleeping bag away. Remind me not to fracture my skull on a rural Chinese road. And thus began the epic story, "How I lost all my camping gear in 55 days"

Species Seen

Lifelists

• Asia
• World

Trips

• Around The World in 66 Days