Wildly wrong weekend

This weekend in China is the famous Dragon Boat Festival (端午节) pinyin: Duanwu. The history behind this festival is particularly interesting. The festival remembers the death of an ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan, of the ancient state of Chu. He was banished for opposing the powerful state of Qin and during his exile he wrote a great deal of poetry. Twenty-eight years later, Qin captured the capital of the state which Qu Yuan was minister of and in despair, Qu Yuan committed suicude by drowning himself in the Miluo River. All of the local people who admired him, raced out on boats to  try and save him (well to retrieve his body), this is how the tradition started. When they couldn't find his body, they dropped balls of sticky rice into the river so that the fish wouldn't eat his body. These are no a famous food related to this festival called, zongzi. The thing in the photo's!

Of course, with it being such a special occasion here in China, me and my flat mate Frederikke thought it would be a great idea to go and witness the racing on Miluo river as it's pretty close to where we live (China close- China is so big so everything is far away compared to the compactness of Europe). We contacted some teachers at the school to help us arrange our trip, one of my teaching assistants actually comes from there but they then told us that there were important political people going there for the festival so all of the tickets had sold out already. We were pretty gutted. I really wanted to be able to witness the festival. So on Saturday, we headed to Orange Island (Juzizhou) for some dragon boat racing but when we got there, there were no boats to be seen, we were either too late or China had just one upped us again with the whole uncertainty thing. I'm going with the latter. We enjoyed a nice afternoon though, had Chinese ice-cream, relaxed on the grass until we were unbearably sticky from the humidity. 

As our plans hadn't really gone to plan, we decided to just take a random trip to Pinjiang... well it turns out the place we wanted to go was another 3 hours drive but I'll come to that. We left our apartment at 7am on Sunday morning and arrived at our destination at 4pm. Let me explain to you what happened during those 9 hours. We were nearly at the bus stop, and I realised that I hadn't picked up my purse when we left, so we had to go back (15 minutes walk). That was fine and we finally got on the bus to go to the East bus station, boatze's in hand. We arrived at the station after nearly missing our stop because we were dozing off. Got our tickets (piao) and with 8 minutes to spare, we raced to find our bus and after a few partly understood conversations, we found it and were on our way to Pinjiang 平江县. The journey took around 2 hours and we arrived at Pinjiang bus station, one guy on our bus was really helpful and pointed us in the direction of another bus which could take us to Shiniuzhai 石牛寨风景区. We were about to get onto the bus when we noticed that the driver was asleep in his seat, there was one other passenger on the bus. We sat down and waited maybe 30 minutes but nothing happened. I went to find a bathroom, I found one and walked in, then I heard a small voice saying "yi kuai"! I apologised and yi kuai (one yuan) to an elderly lady selling tissue paper outside of the toilets. She was really sweet and by Chinese public toilet standards, I was happy to pay for the kind of cleanliness. Then it was snack hunt time, one lady started asking me where I was going and when I told her, of course she had a friend who would take us in a private car for a very good price. As we were having a conversation, an intrigued crowd gathered around us listening to a foreigner speak Chinese (very amusing apparently) but I went back to the bus were Frederikke was, still nobody else had got on to the bus. The driver was still asleep. I asked the girl what time the bus was going to leave and she had no idea either but I guess she was used to it more than us. We decided to go out of the station and see how much a taxi would cost. Bad idea. We were swarmed by guys asking us where we were going. We were told a very expensive price which we declined and tried to bargain, it didn't work, he wasn't budging. I then had to make a phone call to Saeed, who is fluent in Chinese for some help as the conversation was getting too complicated for us. What could be better then being woken up by a phone call only to have to speak to a Chinese person about money. Ooooops, sorrrry! After about an hour, we decided to just go and see how the bus was going and more people had got on! Hooray, so I asked again about the time. We got an answer but of course we had to clarify a few times. A word of advice if coming to China... always clarify and more than once. Now it was 12:30, we had an hour until the bus left so we went to chifan (eat). We found a charming/filthy place at the station and ordered.

I was still worried that the bus would leave sooner so I ran in the pouring down rain to see if it was still there and it was but we decided it would be best if we took our food with us on the bus. You just never know! As we polished of our food, we attracted the usual foreigner attention and then a young student asked us where we were from in English. If a Chinese person can speak English then they will always try. Imagine learning a language for most of your life but never being able to practice, that's how they must feel so when they see a foreigner, they're like "yeah here's my chance" but I want to practice my Chinese, dayum hey. She was sweet and when she got off at her school an hour and a half afterwards, we thought we were also really close to our destination but apparently not... it was ANOTHER hour and a half. We really didn't think it was so far. We weren't going to give up though, there had been too many hurdles. We had waited more than two and a half hours for the bus to move so we had to persevere. When we arrived it was 4pm, we were forced into trying some spicy tofu on the way to the ticket office and then we bought rain poncho's even though I was already soaked and ended up taking it off anyway because of the humidity.

When we finally got to the ticket office, we were greeted by three young women, we asked for two tickets and asked them what time they closed. We had two hours to explore. They insisted that we didn't have enough time and that we should come back to tomorrow. We explained that we had nowhere to stay or the time to come back to tomorrow so we would go now and see what we could. We knew that we would have enough time because we aren't Chinese (you would understand what I meant by this straight away if you were here). Most women wear high heels and pretty dresses to climb mountains here... logical? I think not. Me and Frederikke had appropriate footwear and were not going to back down after it taking us 9 hours to get there. Finally, we got our tickets and we set off looking very attractive in our blue and yellow ponchos. The rain was so heavy, dancing on the lake. It was so beautiful though. We chose a great day to take the trip as we could see the mist twisting in and around the mountain peeks. We took a cable car to the top of the mountain and the views were insane, we went through the clouds of mist and couldn't see anything! It brought back memories of my Skydive,the last time I was so high up and immersed in clouds. I did record the journey alongside my great narration if you would like to see. When we reached the top, we saw the glass bridge! A 180m high suspension bridge that connects one peak to another, which is glass... It was so slippy also which made it slightly more scary but it was ace, I loved it. As I looked over the edge, my stomach sank a few times but then the clouds of mist began to move over the bridge so once again we were immersed. Imagine if we had fallen over the edge? Nobody would have seen us fall. Trust me to think about that but it's so true, the world has it's ways of covering things up doesn't it. Off the radar. 

 We then, began to explore the rest of the National Park, we were stunned. It was really worth the journey. We walked around for two and a half hours... late coming out, oops! Among the other attractions were Drunk Immortal... yes haha! It was 50m high pillar formed by various geological processes and the result was a pillar that looks like a drunken man on his side apparently. As we walked further and further into the depths of the mountains, I was getting pretty hot and sweaty so I took of my poncho and tied it around my bag to keep the contents dry. In the mean time, I got incredibly soaked but I surprisingly enjoyed it. Strolling up and around the mountains along narrow bridges. I also came across a Chinese straw had that had been abandoned by it's owner and hung onto a tree. I took this opportunity to make myself look like a Chinese farmer for a few minutes and tried it out for size. I will definitely be investing in such a flattering piece.


I had a near death experience as we began to descend. I stood and turned for a photograph and as I did so, my foot slipped slightly backwards. Fortunately, I caught my balance and all the damage was my stomach sinking (this is this the photo that I nearly died for).
We paused a few times to enjoy the beautiful view over the surrounding area. We took the hard way down and found ourselves slipping and sliding downwards whilst passing human excrement and being bitten by multiple insects. The perks of China!!
The next part of this journey, is worth reading and worth writing about in my opinion so I do apologise about the length of this post. 


We found out that there were no more buses passing here going to Pinjiang because it was so far away from anything so we decided that we would just start walking the way that the bus had passed. There was a thunderstorm happening too but we didn't have any other choice and liked the idea of a crazy adventure anyway. A the odd motorbike or car passed they would slow and look at us for a minute and then carry on driving. We bought a packet of very dry biscuits on our way as our rations and ate half a packet straight away (wo men er le!). We were walking through random roads heading nowhere but we knew we had to keep moving anyway, we passed random houses and the few people we saw just stared at us, which I found pretty funny. Now something happened in their lives today thanks to us sparking a conversation between them. After walking for around an hour, we continued to say "lets just walk until it gets dark and then think about what we should do next". A small van passed us but cam to a stop. Inside was a man of around 40-50 years old, he asked us where we were going and we tried to explain that there were no buses but we needed to get to a station. He was very kind and he allowed us to get inside his van. We jumped into the back seat and we chatted some more. We were very trusting... but here in China, it isn't a huge problem. We didn't  have any other option anyway. I said "Ni shi henhao ren" (you are a very good person), the most appreciative thing I could think of saying. He seemed to be satisfied with the compliment and we carried on driving. He came to a stop at some kind of car rental place and explained our options by drawing and writing a diagram. He went to so much effort to help us and even took us to a place to eat and paid... We were going to insist but then the whole losing face thing would be even more severe.

He told us that there was somewhere we could stay for the night and that we could catch a bus at 6:30am the next morning. We admitted defeat of getting home to Changsha in the evening and agreed. We had only the clothes we were stood up in which were drenched. The room was surprisingly nice but then when I was on the phone to Saeed explaining what had happened, I spilled water all over the bed. Just a wet day overall. We hit the hay around 11:30 and then woke up at 5:45 ready to catch the bus. We got downstairs at around 6:10 but didn't actually get on a bus until about 7:30... typical. 

At 6:30am waiting for a bus

It took us 3 buses to get home. We arrived home at 2:30pm. Good job I had wonderful scenery to keep me occupied alongside my current read about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Well I think that "sums up" our wild trip. Hopefully it proved an interesting read!