Fashionable Gods

After getting hustled on the boat ride, Colleen and I decided to have an adventure with with few people around us. Our bike ride along the Yu Long river (Dragon River) to the 400 year old Dragon Bridge was cool in so many ways. Not only was the country side and farm land around the river beautiful, the exercise and the feeling of freedom was also wonderful. We need to go on more bike rides together. I don't remember how long our ride was, but I believe it was pretty close to 10 miles all in all, which was a pretty good bike ride for two people that hadn't ridden much before that day.

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Updated 12/20/06

One of the highlights of a trip to Yangshuo is the beautiful Lijiang River. It's one of the natural wonders of China and is featured on the 20 Yuan note. Colleen and I took a boatride down part of the river and found it absolutely breath-taking, like something out of The Lord of the Rings, though the people in the boatride kept trying to sell us stuff, which detracted a little from the atmosphere.

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Update: A few more pictures have been added.

After leaving warm and sunny Sanya we went to Yangshuo in Guangxi province, a cold area in winter that's popular with backpackers and famed for it's breathtaking mountains and rock formations. The weather change was hard for us at first, but there's so much natural beauty in Yangshuo that we had a wonderful time exploring there.

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One of the most fun times we had in Sanya was when we rented scooters for the day and drove around the city and surrounding beaches. Although Colleen rode on the back of my scooter for most of the day, she did get a chance to try it on her own a couple times, and she got to ride her own scooter when we went to Thailand.

( Get your motor running )

During our time in China we got a chance to check out Monkey Island, a nature preserve dedicated to taking care of monkeys (and amusing tourists with the antics of monkey shows). If you'd like to see a lot of cute pictures of monkeys, click ( here. )

After leaving Shanghai, we headed straight for Sanya in the island province of Hainan in South East China. We were trying to beat the winter cold in Northern China, and looking at these pictures is a welcome break from the recent Portland ice and snow.

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It snowed today! Snow on all the cars and slush on the road. I drove so carefully today to avoid sliding out, but the first step I took out of my car, I almost slipped and fell on my butt. I don't know how long it will last, but I'll try to remember my camera tomorrow morning in case there's still snow.

In the meantime, it's back to looking at tropical china pictures for me.

I'm a photo loading maniac, and the fruits of my labor are realized. Our old photos of beautiful Ta Shan are reloaded and you can see them here. I've also finished reloading our pictures of Shanghai and you can see those here. I'll be moving on to Sanya and, who knows, you might even some of those later today as well.

I'm still going through old vacation photos and I just finished uploading our visit to Monkey Island in Sanya. A beautiful place, and we'll post pictures about it later, but at this point if I see another picture of a monkey, I'm going bananas.

Folks, we are experiencing a computer problem. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but most (if not all) of our photos are down. It turns out that the website that had all our photos deleted all of them. Fortunately most of them were backed up on my portable drive so we should be able to get all of them back up on this journal eventually, it's just going to take some time. In the meantime we're going to try and get all of our spring festival/winter vacation photos up first, considering that nobody's seen those yet. I'd like to have all the vacation photos up by Thanksgiving, I don't know if that's realistic or not, but we'll see. At any rate, I hope everyone's having a great winter!

-Matt