Ni Hao~ Part Seven!

June 13, 2010 Part Two:

So! After returning to my sister’s apartment at around 4:30 AM (yes, the sky was already starting to light up!), my sister and I basically knocked out… only to…

Have to wake up around 10 AM to get ready for a 12-hour train ride!! YAH!

WHY?! So, here’s the story:

This week in China (Wednesday, to be precise), is the Dragon-Boat Festival. As such, many businesses take time off, and some people try to take the whole week off. My sister and her boyfriend, for example, took the beginning of the week (Monday-Wednesday) off from work – and so, we used this time to ESCAPE the city-life and go on a mountainous adventure from Sunday-Tuesday night!

So, my sister, her boyfriend, and I took a 12-hour bed-train from Shanghai to Jixi (Anhui province). The overall trip was not too bad, actually, since it was nice to relax on the train, looking out the window, lying on the bed eithr reading or sleeping…

We arrived in Jixi around 1 AM on Monday, then just went to a local hotel and grabbed a couple room for us to sleep (even

more, I KNOW! Ahha!), then wake up in the morning at 8am, getting some morning grub across the street from the hotel.

I was particularly excited about this, since, 1. I love food, 2. This place was just, a VERY informal place run by a family and this nutty-scientist-looking-father, 3. We got to see the food being prepared in front of us, and 4. It was nice and yummay~!

We ended up getting wonton soup, grabbing some bao’s to-go, and watched the father making these fried-dough-stick things that represent this evil rich guy and his wife who schemed against the emperor and were symbolically punished by being fried in oil, muaha!

(Props to my friend Herman who told me this VERY informative food-legend, ahha! Serves as a handy icebreaker, no? hehe!)

Anyway. Back to the hike… Let’s see!

So, the hike that we took is known as the ‘Huihang Way’ path, and goes along/over a mountain ridge, going from Anhui to Zhejiang province.

Huihang Way was this really steep and rock+dirt pathed trail, and was apparently used for hundreds of years for the exchange of green tea from Anhui and grains from Zhejiang.

Although I had some trouble breathing (needing to take a lot of breaks!) and it was a bit drizzly when we were hiking, the mountain views were really gorgeous, with a very mysterious mist over the ridges.

After hiking for 3 hours uphill, we finally arrived at this little village (more like just a cluster of houses, haha!), where we were greeted with green tea and stayed with the Yang family at their very quaint Bed+Breakfast.

This area seems to be a very popular hiking place for both locals and foreigners, so we ended up eating dinner with this family (2 chemists living in Shanghai for 3 years, their VERY cute-and-talkative 11 year old son, and their laboratory-beagle Ginny!), having a nice conversation about Shanghai-life/other nature-getaways over various dishes cooked with bamboo, ferns, pork, as well as soup that had a WHOLE-chicken in it [no joke, it was sitting in there, and I had to cover the head with a spoon because I was so creeped out!].

After having a nice, restful sleep (complete with frogs croaking, crickets chirping, and water streaming~!), we awoke in the morning and had some noodles in a really nice chicken-broth with sunny-side egg on top, as well as a bamboo+veggie filled pancake thing (think, Chinese pupusa!)! Tres yummaaay~! My belly was happy.

After saying goodbye to the Yang family (who looked SO happy and young, by the way! Must be the fresh, mountain-grown food and all the hiking!), we hiked a little further up the mountain to actually reach the mountain peak/ridge, then descended the other side of the mountain towards Zhejiang province.

This, I think, turned out to be a nicer hike than the previous day, since 1. It was mainly downhill, 2. There was a lot more greenery and the sound of birds around us, 3. Honestly, hiking is nice, but the prospect of having a shower and proper-toilets again was really getting me excited!

Anyhow~ It took a long time for us to get back to Shanghai (van, bus, bus!), but we made it back to civilization!

Although the hike was a bit painful for my lungs/heart to handle, it was definitely nice to see the other parts of China – aka, the areas that aren’t so heavily populated with people, the number of cars/motor-vehicles is greatly diminished, greenery exists, water is clean, freshly brewed green tea is a social norm, the air is pure, and life is simple.

(Lots of photo cred on this post to my sister, Erika!)