The Moment You've All Been Waiting For....

Hey there folks! Since I've been a terrible blogger for the last four months or so, I figured that I would do a few independent update posts for all my loyal readers (or lack thereof), hopefully at least one or two of you still check this website every once and a while.

I now present you with Part I: Lian Yun Gang

During the first few weeks of my stay in Nanjing we set off on a weekend trip to the coastal (I hesitate to say beach) town of Lian Yun Gong. Our trip encompassed a three day tour of the town and its surrounding tourist attractions. We arrived late on a Thursday night and were sadly greeted by wind a rain. Looking for a somewhat nicer weekend at the "beach" I hoped that the next day would bring more beautiful weather. Wrong. I awoke to a morning of gloomy skies and rain.

Little did I know that our main "adventure" for the first day was to climb down a rather large mountain. (I would later learn that climbing down mountains is a rather frequent Chinese tourist pass time). After taking a treacherous and speedy bus ride to the peak of what I believe was called HuaGuo Mountain (the home of the fabled Monkey King) we reached the peak only to be greeted with pelting wind an rain.

As you can see in this picture to the right, the weather conditions were less than "optimal." At this point I thought to myself, surely we are going to take a bus back down, now that we've made it to the top and the weather is ridiculous. Wrong again. After a grueling 3+ hour hike through wind, rain, and what I would argue were several small rivers, we finally reached the bottom of the mountain and went to lunch.

We spent the afternoon on boat tour of Lian Yun Gang's (absurdly choppy) harbor and got a view of it's beautiful (mud) beaches. When given a bit of free time to rove the beaches for ourselves, a few friends and I decided to search a nearby set of shops in hopes of a place to play Mahjong, a famous and incredibly popular Chinese game - similar to Gin Rummy - that is played with domino-like tiles.

The second day of our visit to Lian Yun Gang wasn't quite as treacherous as our first, however. We visited a sprawling "valley," which I can only describe as a sort of Chinese-style water park. Given that there were no rides or anything like that, it was a series of beautiful waterfalls, pools, and rivers, that extended deep into a nearby mountain. There was actually a slide that took you from the top of the mountain down through the valley but it was closed on the day we visited. When walking around the valley it was nearly impossible to stay dry, as we constantly had to cross through large and small rivers, pools, and even waterfalls. Despite the fact that it was a bit stormy when we visited, I can imagine that visiting such a place on a warm sunny day would be quite fun.

After our visit to the valley, we hopped on our bus and got ready for the five hour ride back to Nanjing. Despite the various antics and the chaotic weather, our first weekend excursion as the official CIEE Nanjing, Class of Fall '07 was quite enjoyable.