Does anyone have any news (or even better, recent travel experience) in the upper section of the Lancang Jiang valley?

I'm specifically talking about the several hundred kilometer stretch that passes through Dali Prefecture's Yunlong County (云龙县), Nujiang Prefecture's Lanping County (兰坪县), and Diqing Prefecture's Weixi (维西县) and Deqin Counties (德钦县).

Last time I was near there was in Weixi two years ago, and at that time the single road up the entire valley was under heavy construction, with traffic only being allowed through one day a week, and that under terrible, slow conditions.

I'm wondering if the road is finished now. I haven't seen any news items to verify this.

If it's detailed topo maps you're looking for, I don't think anything's going to beat Google Maps' terrain layer. Zoom in to get 100 m contour lines. However, even it's not perfect. Often times, the roads don't quite show up in their accurate location. This can make a big difference if you're cycling and counting on the elevation data to plan your trip.

There are a couple of other maps I can recommend as well (if you can read Chinese).

One is called 云南省地图册. It's part of the 中国分省系列地图册 series and the publisher is 星球地图出版社。It's about 6x10 in., the lefthand side is green, and the righthand side has a picture of two white pagodas. It costs 22 RMB, and I believe I got it at the bookstore next to Yunnan Normal University.

It's got 170+ pages and the great thing is that it's got a unique map for each of the 100+ counties that make up Yunnan province, which means the scale is quite large (i.e. the resolution is quite detailed).

These county maps are all color topo maps. While they don't have contour lines, they do have color shading according that depicts the elevation profile. This makes for a really nice affect - you can really see where the valleys, lowlands, plateaus, canyons, and mountain ranges are, in a more colorful and visual presentation than the monochrome terrain on Google Maps.

Another map I can recommend is a large, wall map of all of China. It's called 中华人民共和国地形图, it costs 20 RMB, and you can find it on the 3rd floor of the Xinhua bookstore at the corner of Beijing and Renmin roads. While it covers the entire country, it's so large that Yunnan province gets a good square foot or so of map space. It's got both contour lines and elevation-based coloring, so it's good for visualizing all the major (and several minor) valleys and mountain ranges in Yunnan.

Here's the GoKunming article (from January this year) about the Kunming-Hekou railroad, the first portion of which (Yuxi-Mengzi) will open in December this year:

www.gokunming.com/[...]

This doesn't exactly make traveling from Kunming to Hekou very convenient. You'd have to first take a cab or bus to the Kunming South Bus Station, take a bus to Yuxi, take a cab or bus across town to the new Yuxi train station, take the train to Mengzi, take a cab or bus to the Mengzi bus station, then a bus to Hekou. All together, that's six separate transportation modal shifts.

Yet it still sounds like fun. The train should be nice and fast. And anything beats the terrible bus ride that is currently Kunming to Hekou, along the interminably slow, old, and congested two lane highway from Shilin to Mengzi. Why the buses take that route instead of through Yuxi, Tonghai, and Jianshui, I don't know. That route, almost all on gaosu gonglu, would be much faster. I've asked the bus driver, and the answer I was given is that the routes are set by the transportation bureau.

Thanks for the info, HFCAMPO. I almost passed through this route coming from the back way, coming down from Haba Snow Mountain, crossing the Jinsha Jiang at Daju (大巨), and then taking the road to Lijiang, but at the last minute I decided to cycle through Tiger Leaping Gorge and back to Lijiang that way. At the time, I thought I'd made a poor decision since I had to pay the 65 yuan to cycle through Tiger even though I wasn't really traveling there, just passing through. I didn't realize that I would have been charged 150 yuan taking the other route, even if entering at the back entrance.

This makes me want to cycle the route, planning to enter after 6pm when the ticket office is closed.

How's the quality of the road on the shorter of the two routes? Is it all paved?

Did you see any signs of the status of construction of the new road to Lugu, which goes past Baoshan Stone city, and crosses the Jinsha Jiang over the new bridge at Fengke (奉科)?

Do you have any pictures of Baoshan that you've posted online anywhere?

If you like trains and history, there are lots of places to enjoy the actual railroad line itself. In case you missed them, I wrote about a bicycling trip along a section of it near the Vietnam border last year, which you can view here:

www.gokunming.com/[...]

And Chris Horton wrote about riding the train within the Kunming city limits here:

www.gokunming.com/[...]

Other towns that the line passes through include Yiliang (宜良), Panxi (盘溪), Kaiyuan (开远), and Mengzi (蒙自). In all of these cities you can see the old train stations, walk amongst the current locomotives and boxcars in the yards, and no one will stop you.