Saturday 26th May

Today I managed to have a lie in until 8.30am. Now if you had told me that this was a lie in a few years ago, I would have thought you were crazy! Seen as my day usually starts when the sun wakes me up through my curtains between 5.30-6am, today was bliss!

The driver we use all the time (Mr Wang) picked me up at 9.30am and we went to pick up Amanda and Raena to go to Badachu. Now I had been told about Badachu when I was in Shanghai in October by another tourist. I had been told that it was a temple on a mountain and when you get to the top there is a toboggan that you can take back down the mountain. This was the bit that I was looking forward to!

It took us over an hour to get there as the traffic was quite bad and by this point it was already 34 degrees. In my guidebook it had said that there was a cable car up the mountain but it wasn’t very well sign posted so Raena (who speaks the best Chinese) asked a man which way we went to get the cable car and he went to ask someone for us. He then came back to tell us that he thought it was down the hill, but then surpassed our expectations and ran down the hill to check for us! Now if this was the other way around and a Chinese tourist had asked me which way something was and I didn’t know, I wouldn’t go and ask someone and I certainly wouldn’t run down a hill in 34 degrees heat and check for them! We were really grateful that he did though and he walked with us to the cable car to check we got there ok, then asked for a photo with us which was funny.

We took the cable car up the mountain, which we were glad we did because it took 15 minutes in the cable car, can you imagine how long that would have taken hiking?! We then walked round the temple at the top and had an ice cream from the little shack up there. It was a clear day so the views were really good, then we got the toboggan back down the mountain which was really fun. At the bottom there was a nunnery and another temple that we looked around and then we got our driver to pick us up again and went back into the city for lunch.

We went to a BBQ restaurant that Raena had been to before which was really good and sat in the sunshine enjoying a Dr Pepper (a very rare thing in China, we were excited to see it on the menu). We then went back to Houshayu and I was home by 7.30pm and started reading a book that I have borrowed called “Chicken for the soul: teachers tales” from another teacher.

I am really enjoying these day trips and that is another place that I have been wanting to go to ticked off my list and also my new thing/place for this week.