I was woken up at 5:35 by a knock on my door. I had meant to get up at 5:25, but had accidentally set my alarm for pm rather than am. I still was perfectly fine, and got to the bus without problems. We got to the airport just a bit before 7. The plane left at 7:50; sergio forgot his passport, and grabbed a cab back. In the end we all made it on the plane without problems. The plane was nice, despite being a 1.5 hour flight. We got breakfast (hot, porridge), sandwiches, and drinks. Some of the kids on the trip are starting to annoy me a bit, but I’m managing fine.
Our destination was hebei, in anhui province. The flight landed without issues, and the airport there was a much smaller deal that in beijing. The baggage carriage was just a circular caracal, and the workers loaded bags off the plane onto carts and manually brought them over to the caracal.
We were met by a tour guide of some nature, and a quite nice bus. I claimed the back row and took a nap for the first part of the road. The road was pretty bumpy, and all together about 3 hours. We passed through a lot of toll booths, also over the yangsi river. There was a point about half an hour before we ended where the road was out, and we were just driving over a dirt road. The road was very empty the whole way. Probably because the main holiday is next week. The last 30 minutes was driving along a two-lane road that switch-backed steeply up the mountain. We probably gained quite a bit of elevation in that part.
At the end we ended up in a place somewhat like lijiang. Lots of small narrow streets with cobbled tiles, and like almost all the shops were incense dealers. We stopped in a little hotel, dropped our stuff, and then went to lunch. Lunch was good, the eggplant was good, as was the fish. After lunch we walked around two temples. The second one was really, really good. there were about 500 steps up to a ridge, and really cool fog shrouded mountains up at the top.
The place was flooded over with old ladies on pilgrimage. They were all over, lighting incense and kowtowing to as many of the buddhas as they could. It was a pleasant trip, lots of cool places, and the environment around us was really pretty.
We walked back down, and my camera ran out of batteries, so of course the rest of the walk back to the hotel I was seeing pictures I wanted to take. I changed batteries, walked out to a few shops to look at the incense and got some roasted chestnuts. It started raining a bit, finally making up it’s mind from the mild drizzle we’d had all afternoon. We retreated back into the hotel, and talked for a few hours before heading in. We’re getting up at 7:00 am tomorrow to go up the back side of one of the mountains. They say it’ll be about 8000 steps, which should be pretty exciting.