Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Hangzhou
Well we arrived in Hangzhou after a quick glight from beijing and met up with Varley. There seem to be much lees western facesin Hangzhou and you are eternally greeted with the term 'laowei', which losely translates as 'outside/foreigner'. Nice!
Not long after arriving, Varley took us to a mountain retreat nearby for what was supposed to be a relaxing couple of days out of the city. It all started well with a nice meal, stunning views etc. It all started to go wrong on the mountain hike the next day. It was supposed to be a 3-4 hour average hike through the bamboo 'jungle' in the mountain. To cut a long story short the 4 hour hike soon turned into an 8 hour hike. We got slightly lost using the rubbish map we had been given. All would have been ok if the sun hadn't gone down and left us unable to see a thing. After a while we lost the path we should have been follwoing up the mountain. We decidded the best idea would be to climb towards the light up and almost vertical muddy mountain face. We lietrally had to cling on to the bamboo to stop ourselves falling. Sadly the furhter we climbed the deeper into the jungle we seemed to get. After climbing for abt 45 mins we decided to change tactics andhead down, trying to follow a stream to get us back to a village where we could get help. This meant basically sliding on our arses all the way down. needless to say we were all a bit of a bloody mess by the end! Obviously we evetually managed to somehow find our way down and out and into saftey. Quite funny now looking back - but at the time I was quite near tears (musch to the boys amusement) and did fear certain death! Oh well, its all character building!
Rest of our time in Hangzhou was quite uneventful comparatively. We did another mountain climb - not quite as interestinf this time though. Also had quite a few chinese banquets where we stuffeed ourselves. Need to start the fighting fit for thailand 2006 campaign!
Off to Shanghai next to see the bright lights of the city!
- comments