Jiufeng Mountain, Ningbo

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We left Ningbo early in the morning, around 8 if I remember correctly. The drive took a couple of hours. At first it was interesting as I got to see parts of my new city that I hadn't seen before, but after a while I became bored. This was due to the bus driver not really having a clue where he was going, which meant we took a few wrong turns and had to double back on ourselves. This was hard on some of the small and windy country roads that we encountered. One highlight though was passing a bus of people all done up for a wedding. They were all dressed in lots of red and looked beautiful. Me and my friend were looking at them and wondering and they were doing the same to us, two foreign faces in China, this lead to a lot of smiles and waving between us and them. Finally, we arrived at the mountain and the group leader gave us our tickets and set us free.

The first part of the walk was along flat ground through the park area at the base of the mountain. There was an interesting looking statue of some old Chinese guy, I presume he must be someone important, but since I can't read Chinese characters I don't know who he is. There were quite a few families in the valley, walking among the rocks. We came to Dragon Lake and it took my breath away. The water was such a beautiful colour. I was so surprised to see it. Normally when people think of China, they think of smog and pollution, me included definitely, so I was so surprised to see these pond. Legend has it that the lake was used by the fungus dragon to practice martial arts. We also passed what looked like a temple, but didn't have time to stop and explore. The hike started to climb a little but wasn't very steep. We came to a small pool called Wuxiaoniang Pond. the legend attached to this pond is that the five daughters of the East China Sea dragon lived on Jiufeng Mountain and they bathed and played in the stream. I like that each place of special interest on the mountain has a signboard explaining the legend behind it, and is in English. Once again the colour of the water in the pool was amazing, so blue and also so clear. We continued up the valley. The views were gorgeous as we were surrounded by small mountains in all directions and we saw Chess Peak, which also had a legend attached to it. One of the highlights on the way up was visiting the Dragon Pond's Plunging Waterfall. It was really pretty, but also very busy and impossible to get a decent picture if the waterfall without people in the shot.

Further up there was a tiny waterfall, which was deserted and looked really cute. There was a small rope bridge above it, too. So we got to walk across the top part. About halfway to the top there is a big rest area with a cafe/restaurant and a few little shops selling things. It was all overpriced, but it was nice to be able to by an icy cool drink. At one point on the trail, we saw a snake! I was totally not expecting to see anything like that. It just seemed to jump across the path in front of us. I'm glad we spotted it before we got to close to it. The final ascent to the peak got steep and was all steps. Since I hadn't done any hiking in ages, it was pretty tough. However, we were rewarded with gorgeous views. It was a pretty clear day so we could see a lot of the surrounding countryside. We could also see parts of the city below. There were some fairly large settlements, but we were far away from the general urban sprawl of the city. An interesting thing about the view was that there were lots of trees that looked like they had been planted and they were divided by small walls. This combined with the fact that the trees were planted in lines, gaining in height due to the mountain, they really reminded me of rice terraces.

Coming down the mountain was a lot quicker and it didn't take us long to reach the bottom. I was surprised that we didn't really see anyone else from our group hanging about. Most of them had got down the mountain before us. We didn't have to wait too long for the bus to arrive and when it arrived everyone else miraculously appeared. I was dreading the journey back as the journey to the mountain had seemed to take forever. However, this time the bus driver knew where he was going and we got back to where we needed to be in about an hour.

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