Nine Pools

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This past weekend, the entire CET group, American students, Chinese Roommates and our teachers all went to a national park called 9 Pools about 7 hours outside of Shanghai near the city of WenZhou. We left at 4:30 am Saturday morning by bus which was pretty miserable as there were no empty seats and our bus driver made very good use of the horn at every possible opportunity. Despite this, I still managed to get some sleep before we arrived at the park. I spent a good portion of the bus ride fuming about forgetting my camera, but I actually am really happy that I did as you will see why later. I also stole pictures from friends to post for everyone to see. The park is about an hour outside of the city, up in the mountains. There had been a lot of rain so the road to the park was washed out and we had to hike 45 minutes to get to the entrance of the park. The dirt road was lined by rice terraces that rose up along the sides of the mountains that formed the valley we hiked through. Farmers tended the terraces and would stand up and stare at us when we passed by. The park is not at all a tourist destination and is quite remote so I think that they were pretty surprised to see us. We saw a couple of Chinese people at the actual park but that was it. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous. Misty clouds obscured the tops of the mountains and waterfalls cascaded down into the valley. We finally made it to the park at about 1:30 and were greeted by incredible pools of cold, clear water hollowed out to great depths by big waterfalls. We immediately jumped in to swim. The water was perfect after our long hike and cramped bus ride. The park is named after 9 large swimming pools underneath 9 waterfalls. To get to the higher pools we had to hike up these crazy sets of stairs rising along the edge of cliffs with no railings or safety precautions. At the second pool we found a rock above one of the falls that we could do flips and dives off of which was awesome. Our Chinese rommates were hilarious throughout the whole trip. Most Chinese have very little experience in the water and all of them wore personal flotation devices and refused to get more than a couple of feet into the water. We got three of them to jump off the rocks with us but they were absolutely terrified.. We spent 4 hours at the pools before we had to head back to the bus to head up to the top of mountain where we were supposed to spend the night at a Daoist Temple before waking up early to see the sunrise. Right as we were leaving the pools it started pouring rain and the hike down the valley was extremely precarious. THe rain made the algae covered rocks slick and just about everyone fell at least once. When we made it to the road we were greeted by deep mud to tomp through. We finally made it back to the bus and started to head up the highest mountain in the range. After an hour of hairpin turns hundreds of feet above the valley floor we were stopped and told that we couldn't continue because of a landslide that blocked the road. Our group leader decided that we were try to spend the night in WenZhou but that didn't work out as foreigners need a passport to check into a hotel and nobody had room for a group of 40 anyway. SO we had to drive all the way back to SHanghai that night and got back to the dorm at around 5am Sunday morning, I slept until 2pm.

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Photos

The Road In
Our bus wasn't about to make it over this