Imagine, if you will...

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I never knew a meal that consisted entirely of bamboo-based foods could be quite so delicious as the one I ate today, and I'm rather happy with the discovery. After visiting a bamboo museum and a large field of bamboo, then traveling over a mountainside covered in literally dozens of varieties of the grass by gondola lift, we were greeted by an assortment of bamboo shoot dishes, with various mushroom, vegetable, and meat components, and more stalls selling bamboo souvenirs that I ever thought I might see. What we saw after lunch, however, is something I hope I'll remember as long as I live.
When everyone had done their shopping, put their things on the bus, and was ready for another "little hike," we walked through more bamboo to a dock made of bamboo, complete with bamboo rafts and oars. Of course, we had to make a big deal of the rafts and see who could out-paddle who to what point, and had a lot of fun along the way. Finally we made it to our intended destination; a point perhaps fifty feet from where we had started, but not nearly as fun to reach.
We hiked up a little more of the pathway, through more bamboo, we reached a large pagoda and spent some time making our way up its high, cramped stairways, and the we ventured further into the bamboo sea.
Around the time we realized we were on the side of a mountain, everyone's jaw dropped in stunned silence for a solid few minutes. I'm really not sure how to explain what we saw, because most of it can't really be put into words; we saw thousands of years of human achievement, cubic acres of earth reshaped to guide gigantic rivers worth of water, there were steps that had been brought in some years ago and rock faces that had probably seen dynasties rise and fall before anyone knew who Jesus was, springs of water from untouched mountaintops, and temples that grew out of cliffs. I don't know that I'll ever see anything else like it in my lifetime, and that makes me think that once is hardly enough to really grasp what we were looking at. We got a bird's eye view of an irrigation system that had saved probably billions of lives over thousands of years by pushing flood waters into submission, and absolutely beautiful carvings cut straight into the mountain's face.
We spent hours walking up and down the mountain, through small communities and temples, all the while looking down the face of a cliff and into the huge valley filled with irrigation trenches.
It took a lot of walking and more stairs than I care to count to get up and down that rock face, but I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling that came with seeing everything we did this afternoon. It was a wonderful experience and if I ever get the chance, I would do it again in a second.

When we got down the mountain and onto the bus, we drove to another hotel in Zigong city, the Huidong Hotel. Tomorrow, we visit the Museum of Salt.

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