Guoliangcun, up in the mountains!

So, since Pingyao, we have travelled quite some kilometers, but we are still quite close to Beijing, at least according to the map, but I feel we are so far away and so inside China in every way, hehe!

We took a bus from Pingyao to Taiyuan, last Thursday, I think, then we had to spend the night there, because there were no tickets to Xinxiang, next stop. But we got up early, and took the morning train, which of course took the whole day, and more than that, think we spend ten hours or more on that train. So we spend the night in Xinxiang. Then, on saturday 17 of may, the nationalday of Norway, we took taxi-bus-bus-taxi to get to Guoliangcun, a small village with threehoundred inhabitants, and it happened to be maybe the most beautiful place we have ever seen! The mountains are incredible, it is so green everywhere, and so many scenic spots to visit, lovely!The village is about 16thousands meter above sealevel, but we climbed a really high peak, and then we climbed even higher, so we have been quite high up again, and seen quite a view! And waterfalls and caves and small rivers, it is jst perfect. And very popular scenery for filmmaking, a lot of Chinese films have been made there, and eighty % of the villagepeople are in several of these films, very funny! So the place was quite famous in China, but the Chinese tourists were very surprised to see foreign people there, like how could we know about this place?? Lonely Planet, of course..
An artschool were there at the same time as we, and we got several new friends, which is always great! We spoke chinese and english and got along very well! We were also maybe the most popular tourist attraction there, everyone wanted a picture of us.. I actually got pain in my smilingmuscles.. Heheh!
We stayed for 4 days instead of 2, and really enjoyed all of it!

Yesterday we left the mountains and drove taxi-bus-bus-bus-bus to get to Zhengzhou, not Chengdu, earthquakesarea, and we planned to leave for Xian today already, but there were no traintickets, so we have to stay one more night here, planning to buy badminton-set and find a park! Hihihi!

That was one week very briefly! Enjoy yourself wherever you are!
gunhild

Earthquake in Chengdu

We are ok!! All though you could feel the earthquake from Bangkok to Beijing, 7.8 on Richters, we were not that close to the center. Kristoffer actually felt it, and so did most of the people here! It felt like you got very dizzy or something, like the world was spinning a little bit. I didn't feel a thing, because I was out shopping (and then I am very busy, too busy for earthquakes) and the street I was in was under construction, so it was a lot of noise and the earth seemed to be shaking anyway..

So now you know, we are both ok, but we feel sorry for all the people who died or lost someone in the catastrophe, it is all over the news all the time, and we see a lot of horrible pictures and so on.

We are leaving Pingyao today, trying to get to a small mountainvillage with 300 inhabitants, so I guess we will not have access to the internet in some days;)

gunhild

Noen reisedager har gaatt..

Det var lenge siden, sorry, men av en eller annen merkelig grunn kan vi ikke aapne bloggen igjen, typisk.. Jeg har naa sneket meg inn bakveien for aa oppdatere dere litt;)

We have left Beijing, bit more than a week ago, went first to Datong, a coalminecity, which happened to be even more polluted than Beijing! But the hotel was great, and we went to see some old old caves with stonecarvings from 460 a.d, old old old!! That was spectacular, the caves and the thousands and thousands of Buddhas and other figures they had carved from the stones and inside the mountains, incredible! see the pictures at flickr!

We spend two nights there, and then we went higher up in the mountains, to Wu Tai Shan, a buddhistic holy mountain area, with a few inhabitants, but a lot of temples1 We saw 5 temples in one day, they were just side by side! And to avoid the tempeloverdoze was quite hard! The next day we had worse weather, but we managed to climb up some steep stairs to a tempel quite far up in the mountainhill, the village itself was 2500 m above sealevel, so it was quite high up! Great view! And then it rained the rest of the day, so we watched olympic tv channel and played cards;) Great!

The next day, I think that was thursday, we left Wu Tai Shan and travelled by txi, bus and train via Taoyuan to Pingyao, were we have spend 4 or 5 days now, and we will still stay a bit longer I think, a great hostel, and a lovely city within the city, it has got walls and everything! We still haven't done the tourist part, we just relax and enjoy life, but today or tomorrow we will take the walk upon the old city walls! Looking forward to it!

We are still having a great time!

Have a good time whereever you are in the world!
gunhild