Wuyi Shan Part One

I finally went through a bulk of my pictures while I was sick (yes again). So, here's a peek at my trip to Wuyi Shan or Wuyi Mountain in Fujian province. The whole area is a protected forest with a lot of hiking trails. Also, known for the tea produced on the rolling, hilly countryside. The surrounding town is under a lot of development into a vacation/tourist destination. My mom has friends who own a bamboo products factory there and they invited us down for a nice respite from Shanghai, which was much needed on my part. The first day we went on a bamboo raft trip down the river.


The rafts are actually two skinny ones tied together. Then some bamboo chairs are strapped on top where we perch for the rest of the journey. One person in the front and one in the back to pole us through the water. Look at that sweaty back folks! Hard work.

The river is called the 9 Bend River and along the way there are a lot of rocky formations. The tour guide explains a lot of the stories surrounding these formations but he admitted that it's 90% imagination and 10% truth. He'd say things like, this is called "Two Turtles Resting" and that one is "Empire State Building". In this second picture if you look closely you can see splits about half-way down the face of this rock wall. There are actually pieces of lumber sticking out of these areas from coffins that have been plundered. The mystery is how these coffins got to be there in the first place given the location of these slit-like caves.

This is a famous site, but I forgot the name already. The rafting trip was very calming and really my pictures do a crap job of capturing how pretty everything was. Huge sheer rock faces coming up on all sides, the perfect cool air, the thousands of little fish following our raft, the echoing conversations of the local raft guides, the annoying little boy who refused to wear his life vest...

Afterwards we visited some of the surrounding buildings that had famous poetry carved on the walls, completely unappreciated by me since I cain't read none too good. Apparently in the olden days a lot of scholars and literati lived in the town and this is where I wish I had a better understanding of Chinese history because my mom offered up this translation: These are famous writings by famous people.