Hong Kong

Hey!

Well blogger has been down in China again so we have not been able to post our full trip. My mom and brother had a crazy flight getting here. They were delayed a full day and the airline lost their luggage!!! They were in amazing spirits though and didn't let it bother them for a second :).

Here is my mom and brother arriving in Hong Kong. We were so excited to see them. It is still unbelievable that they were actually here!!!

We were in Hong Kong for Chinese New Years which was apparently the best place in China to be. This is a dragon performance right outside of our hotel.

This is the massive amount of people that came out for the New Year's parade. This was the number of people in every direction for miles. Josh particularly likes this picture because his favourite food/restaurant is in the background.

We had pretty good seats for the first half of the parade even though we were only able to see large floats.

In the last hour of the parade we all managed to make it up to the first row. We were very lucky to see what we got to see because hundreds of people didn't get to see anything at all.

Elephant Trunk Hill

One of Guilin’s most famous landmarks is Elephant Trunk Hill, which lies in the center of the city. As you can see below, there is a cave that gives the hill the look of an elephant with its trunk hanging down into the water.

During our day there we didn’t bother to cross the river to get a view of why it is actually called Elephant Trunk Hill. We thought that we could always get a picture from the street later after we left the park. When we came back to get a picture we found that a view of the hill is completely blocked from all angles unless you enter the park, which of course you have to pay for.

Like I said we weren’t actually able to get this picture ourselves, but we just got this picture off the internet.

From the peak of Elephant Trunk Hill.

A Cruise Down the Li River in Guilin

Our next stop after Xi'an was Guilin. Guilin is known as one of the most beautiful places in China. Millions of years ago Guilin was underwater and limestone deposits formed, which now give Guilin a very unique landscape.

On our first day in Guilin we took a cruise down the Li River. The weather was a little gloomy, but not too bad.

After the cruise a bus took us to the famous county, Yangshuo. Yangshuo is about an hour's drive from Guilin and features the same beautiful landscape, as well as some nice shops and restaurants.

Here is Jen on West street in Yangshuo.

Mount Huashan

One of our favourite days from the trip was was the day we climbed Mount Huashan. We had to cheat a little and take a cable car part of the way up. Otherwise it would have taken more than a day to cover the mountain and that was time we didn't have. It was still a lot of work though. It took three hours of walking up stairs to go from the cable car dropoff to the highest peak.

This is Jen one hour into our climb. You can see where the cable car dropped us off in the white building near the top of the picture.

Even after an hour that was the distance we still had left to go!

There are five main peaks at Mount Huashan. We only had time to go up two of them, west peak and south peak. The south peak is the highest at 2160 metres and the west peak is 2082 metres. This picture was taken from west peak with the south peak behind us.

This a view of the west peak and the ridge that connects the south and west peaks.

We were running out of time and had to rush the last stretch up to the south peak. You can see how tired I am in this picture, but we made it. We were only there for a moment though before we had to rush back down the mountain to catch the bus.

Our Trip Across China

Hey, we're back!!

Our 3 week trek across China has come to an end and now we're back teaching in Liyang. There are so many pictures and stories to tell so we'll share some of that here and save the rest for when we get home.

The first city we visited was Xi'an. Of course, one of our first stops was the terracotta warriors.

Here I am standing in front of pit 1, which is the largest of the three pits being excavated. It is believed that there will be 6000 soldiers found in this pit by the time the digging is finished. It's a very impressive sight!

At the back of pit 1. You can see the warriors here are still part of the group being restored. Some of them are in pretty rough shape.

One of our evenings in Xi'an we went out to a small Chinese bar where we had a fantastic night. The guy between Jen and me is the bartender. He taught us a fun Chinese drinking game, which got us a lot more tipsy than we were planning on getting. The guy on the far right was one of the performers that night. The live music was great. The other guy, Shane, was the only other foreigner in the bar who we also had a good time with.