The Best and the Worst (of all of us!)

I’ve stolen the notepad back to share a few thoughts on our trip through China!

She continues to throw her best and worst at us. Briefly, the worst centres around the car driving, horn tooting, loud voices straight into the ear (while talking to someone else), men smoking and hacking and people generally pushing their own way forward. Oh, and some of the “roads”!

The best is about the friendliness and kindness of the people and the interest and amazement they show about us, our ages and the trip we’re doing. In China, it’s polite to ask someone’s age, but not profession, so everyone knows how old we are.

Fortunately they revere oldies, so respect us and give us senior discounts on a lot of the tickets we’ve purchased as entries to natural attractions. Lots of little children say hello or just gape at us. Lots of people want to photograph us, either with consent or sneakily. We thought about funding the trip by charging one yuan per photo and we’d be in front if we’d started doing that from Timor Leste!

The scenery has mostly been remarkable, with soaring mountains of all shapes, sizes and colours, rivers of all colours, speeds and volumes, rocks, waterfalls, V-shaped and U-shape valleys, grasslands, gorges, landslides and more!

We’ve also experienced a full range of weather, from snowy winter to sweaty summer, sometimes all in one day. Peter manages to find at least one superlative per day and we usually agree with him.

Our beautiful guide, Green, continues to look after us in the best way, making sure none of us dodder anywhere and getting us about with a minimum of U-turns. She has had to deal with our boof-headedness at times (especially from Alan and Barry) and has done this with grace. And fortitude… I did suggest she might like to be called Jade, as it’s a bit prettier than Green and she was most offended. Jade is “many different colours” and she is GREEN! (born on world environment day).

We all tested our legs yesterday after a magnificent cable car ride up into the Huashan mountains. We walked most of the day up and down stairs all over the highest mountain peaks. Alan and Barry walked “the plank in the sky” – seriously scary and very exhilarating for Alan, who used to be a big scaredy-cat with heights.

The most I’ve challenged myself here is by driving, where eyes have to be on 360 degree swivel sticks and concentration and reflexes have to be 100 percent, 98 percent of the time. The other (very tame) thing was a flying fox ride across a shallow valley, in a canvas harness, with Barry going along before me. I enjoyed it!

We don’t get much down-time, so can get a bit tired. However, we’ve all become very adaptable, not knowing where we’ll be sleeping at night and what’s ahead of us each day. Even Green gets some surprises as she hasn’t been to some of the places we’ve visited. We’ve met very few white faces as most tourists are domestic. We’ll be in Beijing in a few days. Can’t believe how the weeks whistle by!

Until next time.