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Published: December 6th 2010
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Monster Spider!!!
I dont know if this will come out, but theres a massive spider that had built its web over the path, so we took about 15 mins trying to photograph it... So,I’v finally got that blog up, I actually wrote it on the monster plane journey home for a couple of weeks to see everyone. It was really nice to be back, got to have a couple of weekends at home and had a week up in Newcastle, though theres no denying it, england is bloody freezing!!! Had a fun night out on Wednesday and some lovely home food cooked by momma and Clare, and was kinda sad to go back to Hainan at the end of it...
The flight did, however give me plenty of opportunity to plan my new years holiday plans, and considering that I have around 2 months of travelling, I intend to see lots and lots!!! Have already planned out some travelling with Clare until the 10th of Jan, but then. I think I'm going to fly up to Ha'erbin (where it's between -20 and -30) to see the ice festival before making my way down through the rest of China seeing as much as I possibly can, and eventually returning to Haikou for the start of the next term on the 28th of February.
This weekend we went to Wuzhishan for some rafting and to
The Bus
notice the woman in the foreground with the headress - She's a Li. hopefully climb the one of the larger mountains, as wed done the journey before, it was a whole lot easier that before! We got there, having caught each bus with a few minutes to spare, and then checked in to our hotel, only to find that there was no rafting happening that day, and there may be none happening the day after. Not to be deterred from having fun, we went exploring around the rice paddies around Shuiman, and had a look at a couple of Minority villages (the Li and Miao people are quite common around this area). We had a lovely chinesey banquet meal, and I promptly fell asleep at 7pm...which, I admit, was probs a little bit gay of me.
The next day Hannah and I rose early to climb Wuzhishan mountain, which was amazing, the views were incredible, and we were climbing up some inclines at points that seemed a little bit dodgy. The climb is purported to take 4 hours, but we climbed for just over 2 hours, climbing quite fast and powering through our stash of crazy chinese snacks. We had almost reached the top, but then we had to turn back, as
Kids
loving the hat... we were going to miss the rafting in the afternoon, and the cloud had closed in and it was raining below us. The climb back down was rather dodgy, with some of the path being rather slippy and the only thing to break your fall being a tree 15 metres away. It was fun though, and on the way down we passed quite a few Chinese groups making the ascent, all with little to no idea of what they were doing, in the wrong clothes, but seemingly happy all the same! We finally got back to the hotel(we'd bargained the room rates from 300¥ to ¥168) had a quick shower, and then headed off to go rafting at the "small" rapids, as the large ones had broken their boat.
The rafting was hilarious, we arrived, were given builders hats and ridiculous lifejackets and a 5 minute safety talk which we didn't understand a word of, but 'mingbai'ed (understand) all the same and were put into our little 2 person boats. We first had to paddle across a small resevoir, and then we were directed down the sluice of the dam, firing out and being fully submerged before finally resurfacing, unable
The View
Absolutely beautiful, it closed in later, but you could just see for soo far! to control our direction as they'd take our paddles and simply furnished us with a bamboo pole to push ourselves away from rocks... Needless to say there were no safety men about, and down the river at least 2 boats capsized and had to be rescued, we got grounded I don't know how many times, and at the end people ended up arriving with one boat with 3 people in it, one upside down with someone sitting on top, quite a few lost shoes, a broken bamboo stick (my bad) and countless bruises and scrapes. Nonetheless it was absolutely great fun, and I'm hoping I can do it again at some point.
It was finally time to head back, so, after buying some Wuzhishan honey(from the beekeepers themselves) and some crazy spirit with bees in it, we headed back to Haikou and civilisation. Didn't get any homework done all weekend, but meh.
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Hannah
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Haha Ben I just googled 'Wuzhishan honey' to see if there was anything about it on the web and your blog was the first thing that came up!! Weeirrrrddd!! Such a funny weekend! :D