Azure City Mountain

Azure City Mountain, or Mt Qingchenshan, was pretty awesome.
It's named because it looks like it's surrounded by a collosal wall of connected mountains and the effect this had at the top was stunning. The air was misty too, just like in my most memorable dreams. ....

A most excellent mountain, which I would recommend to any of you, since it's almost like a well kept (national) secret -few foreigners ever make it here, and it's really unspoilt by commercialism. And it was good clean work out as well.

A shrine to Lao Zi, (Literally means "old dude" haha) philosopher and author of Tao Te Ching, is at the top, riding on a golden bull. Legend has it that he was born aged 37, with white hair and beard, hence the name.

It rained a lot. It rained a *lot*. It rained so much that you had to scream at each other to be heard above the slapping of water on water on water on concrete, somewhere under all the water. The drainage couldn't cope. The frogs couldn't cope. It was quite exhilarating. It was scary. It tested my limits (I swear, *nowhere* on my body was dry. And that was before I walked under the waterfall! -see pic) The emergency services turned up. There had been a landslide! If we hadn't decided to take the cable car back down, we may not have managed to get down at all. I'm glad Anna's tough. Then again, she had the umbrella. It ripped.
Yeah, that's a lot of rain.
But we coped. (Grrr)
Oh yeah, and the camera lens steamed up. :'(

And since Anna and I are so ^fit^ (lol) we finished Qingchenshan with enough time to visit DuJingYen, an ancient river manipulation area (floods => deaths => slice up mountain => drop rocks into river => slow down river ~sound familiar?)
where a bit of an adventure ensued, involving us hitch-hiking a lift back to civilsation in a minivan with these two brothers who sounded like villains from some low budget movie. Or Darth Vader, with flu. lol.
Anyone who wants to hear more about that can leave a message.

Anyway, I went on for ages in the last post (Hope you all looked closely at the pics!) so I'll just let the photos do the talking. They work well as prompts anyway.

Love.

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