Travelling Chinese

---

So I hit the mountain and with the weather the day before looking like it was clearing up, thought we might be alright.. no, not at all!! It couldn’t have been raining harder! Got prepped at the bottom of the mountain, meaning getting rid of anything that was going to get wet. No shoes, no shirt, no worries =D stuck a comical poncho on to look a bit like a tele tubby and started the accent. The Chinese know how to be tourists and were cracking us up! They all looked exactly the same with bright yellow ponchos with matching trousers, shoe covers and obviously a camera, there were armies of them traipsing about everywhere you went! The mountain seemed to get wetter and the view wasn’t much but was all good fun, all the Chinese loved us and each one would laugh ‘aaaarr no shoes no shoes’! The paths were pretty decent and hit the top in a couple of hours to see, well absolutely nothing. Visibility was about 20m haha. Snuck into a hostel for an awesome hot shower and nap but got very suddenly woken with good and bad news.. it was STILL raining BUT you could see the mountain! Got on top and took in the best view of the day, the haungshan mountains were apparently were the idea for the floating mountains in avatar came from, with the clouds dropped below the peaks so it was very cool to actually see them!

The rain didn’t stop so the next best thing to do was eat. Stuffed our faces and hit the sack, after planning to rough it in the wild on top had fallen through due to the ridiculous amounts of rain the free bed in the hostel seemed like a good plan B! Early start to catch the sunrise yeah, rain and no view, back to bed, yeah! Getting a lie in to ‘miss the crowds’ was a great idea though and soldiered back to the bottom. Day 2 on the mountain consisted of getting realy wet again, shouting a lot, being unusually crazy compared to the Chinese who found it very entertaining, swimming in waterfalls and occasional glimpses of the peak that were these massive granite things with shear jagged drops just spurting out of everywhere! So sum up our route we went up the east passed the dog howling at the moon and the cats fighting mice, round Gods pointing path and up to the Brightness peak, over the fairy bridge to come back down the west passed the half moon man and through the wishing waterfall of tea or something along those lines. Interesting!

Had a pretty good massage back in town and ate loads more good food, bed was welcoming though that night. Got invited to a local art exhibition, was one of the best artist in the area maybe even china! Was all traditional and really good, he fed us heaps of tea and got a free painting on the way out! Straight from there onto a bus as far north as I could get at short notice because apparently you can’t just rock up and get on a bus somewhere you want to go which sucks! Got a mugged off by a taxi guy at the other end for a train ticket twice the going rate, but was a locals only train so I was literally the only white guy for miles and turned out to be a sleeper so win win!

Now living it up in Beijing, staying with another American English teacher and a Swedish surfer so were having a blast! Went to a local Chinese punk show and had a 3 man mosh haha ending up smashing a bottle of local booze and a load of beers obviously wheey!!! And that made today fairly unproductive! Other than finding even more awesome food.. today’s best were donkey rolls, basically big and possibly better Peking duck pancakes mmm.

On the people side of china I'm still struggling to find very many down to earth locals. There seems to be 2 different types.. No.1, the tourist, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’re up to but your white, tall, blonde and pretty handsome haha so they will just take pictures, point and stare. No.2, the bastards! Who don’t care who you are or what you’re up to but white your doing white your white and speak no Chinese so will give you no time of day and basically ignore you while spitting everywhere! So that's a bit disappointing but aah well you can’t be friends with everyone and at least the food is awesome!!!

x

---