camping in china

SR and i joined a camping group last weekend for a trip out to anhui province, about a five hour drive southwest of Shanghai. it was my first experience camping in china, and was not that different from what we do in the US.

in the end, it was a good trip, though i was feeling a little bit differently on Saturday morning when we were hiking in the rain after not sleeping on Friday night - that's right, we didn't get to the trailhead until 6:30 am (after getting lost a few times), so had no time to sleep and just had to start hiking.

SR ended up having a good time but i dont think she was so glad she had come on saturday. i was regretting it too. it rained most of the day saturday.

we camped in a big clearing in between two mountain peaks. we had to pitch our tents in a little wood cabin. they started some fires in the cabin, which made it so smokey i couldnt open my eyes, but i couldnt go outside because the wind was so intense - clouds blew in the door whenever it was opened.



so a funny thing happened with our tent - it was meant to be put up outside (which seems reasonable), and so you needed to put stakes in the ground to keep in standing up. well, since we were inside, we couldn't put stakes in the ground. so i was feeling pretty stupid, and SR was getting a little disappointed in her first tent experience.

but eventually we rigged something up - put one corner under a table led, a few others attached to other tents - so that it was standing up fine. we slept 11 hours that night.





got up at sunrise to beautiful weather. if i can see a nice sunrise, that makes any trip worthwhile. there is something about seeing a sunrise.
we then got to hang out on the mountain top for a few hours enjoying the sun.

the hike down was great. went through several small villages. folks from the countryside are often very warm. the people we ran into were very friendly.

so in the end, a good trip. we will hopefully be going again.