Last time I posted, I had just gotten back from Shanghai on Mid-Autumn festival break, and literally a week later I get another break for National Day. This is the last long vacation time for people in China until Chinese New Year, so a lot (I mean a lot) people go out and travel for this particular holiday.
As Alec (my old room mate) and I were deciding where to spend our holiday last minute, it was probably not in our best interests to buy last minute. Fortunately we found some tickets to Ningbo and planned to travel to the islands nearby to do some camping.
Riding on the High-Speed Rail first class, nothing like flying first class unfortunately, it's about a 3 hour ride from Nanjing to Ningbo, and then we needed to get on a bus to shuttle us over to the islands. In like any tourist-y area there are always people asking where you're going and if you need a ride, now imagine that on a much larger scale. Appearing Chinese on the outside, I was bombarded with where are you going, do you need a ride, so my trick with getting them off my back is saying "No Chinese" in English. As I'm waiting in line to buy bus tickets, some dude is asking me the same questions, and I tell him "No Chinese." With a perplexed look on his face, he says in Chinese "What language is that, that's not Chinese." I responded to him in foreign accented Chinese, "No Chinese, means cannot speak Chinese." Alec is laughing his ass off. Naturally the guys assume I'm Korean, so I just leave it at that.
Anyways, getting to Dinghai and wondering around for a good part of the afternoon, asking where we could camp. It didn't look too hopeful, so we took a city bus to another island in search for a bit more luck. Fortunately the island down south was more beach-y, and we end up beach camping for the night. The place we ended up camping at was a sand sculpting park. So there was this lovely light/sand sculpture show before we went to bed.
Well the journey home I think will make a great blog post.
Until next time,
-MC
Anyways, getting to Dinghai and wondering around for a good part of the afternoon, asking where we could camp. It didn't look too hopeful, so we took a city bus to another island in search for a bit more luck. Fortunately the island down south was more beach-y, and we end up beach camping for the night. The place we ended up camping at was a sand sculpting park. So there was this lovely light/sand sculpture show before we went to bed.
Next morning, after we got bored with the beach and Chinese girls wanting to take a picture with Alec, cause he was literally the only white person on the island. We decided to hike up the road to see what else the island had in store. We kept following the winding until we got to this path that took all the way to a radio station tower. From there we kept following a path that lead us to a creepy pink house. I'm talking like spooky creepy. And what's inside this spooky creepy pink house? That's right a bomb shelter-like room, expect this one is dug into the side of a mountain. Worst part is that there was multiple chambers in the dungeon room, and that lead to more rooms. We think it's from culture revolution era or around that time. It was really cool and interesting, but creepy and scary.
After the creepy, scary dungeon house, we just kept following the road to wherever it took us. Basically hiked for about 3 until we hit the next big town, but they had no camping grounds or anything close to it. So we improvised. We did a little urban camping (slept in a parking lot, near a park though). In the morning we found out that a typhoon was coming, so we figured that we should head home a day early......
Well the journey home I think will make a great blog post.
Until next time,
-MC
