Tours

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Yesterday I rented a driver for the day, in order to see the sites on the other side of Lake Erhi. This started with a chair lift up a very high mountain. At the top of the mountain their was a "stunning natural cave!", which in fact turned out to be a psychedelic light show highly reminiscent of the river tunnel in Shanghai. However, this one was much longer and involved walking up what felt like 1000 flights of steps. On the way back down the mountain I tripped and twisted my ankle. Today it's black and blue, but I wasn't about to let that make me stop my trip at the time (on the bright side, I now know the Chinese vocabulary for “twisted ankle”, “hurt”, and “mountain”).

After limping down the mountain I was offered a free tea tasting - I suspect because I was limping. It was the Bai three course tea again, except it seemed to have very little to do with the last Bai three course tea I tried. In fact, it had four courses. After trying it I was told to give the tea house 100 Yuan, or at least I thought that's was what I was being told to do. I was actually buying tea, and a large amount of it at that. It was the same tea I'd tried, and I did like it, so it could be worse. The packaging is quite pretty. I'm not sure how I'm going to get it back to Wuhan though, because the quantity of the stuff is positively daunting, and I don't have much room in my luggage.

The driver proceeded to take me to three temples, a small fishing village, and the outside of an island temple. He tried to get me to follow him on some kind of rock climbing thing, but I figured that it would be better not to true it. I don't regret that too much. However, I had really wanted to take one of those little boats out to the island temple, but didn't feel up to it. That I do regret.

My driver was talkative, and as much a tour guide as a driver. He only spoke Chinese, which gave me a good chance to practice. He made much of the fact that I am the same age as his son. He also frequently stopped the car whenever he thought the scenery especially picturesque, and instructed me to take pictures. At one point he tried to get me to photograph an old woman slaughtering a chicken in one of the temples, but we were about three feet away from her, and visibly photographing normal people going about their lives struck me as an incredibly rude thing to do. Besides, the scenery was too exquisite to waste a picture on a dying chicken.

Today my ankle protested to my doing anything, so I sat around the hostel and read. Tomorrow I’m taking a bus back to Kunming, and hopefully getting a train back to Wuhan from there. I still plan on going to Shanghai, but a stop back in Wuhan won’t cost any more than taking a direct train, and it will save me from being on a train for more than 48 hours in one stretch.

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Comments

[Bruce Jones]

Sorry about your ankle.....I hope you are on the mend! And no, I do not need alot of tea either......