Moganshan

Christine and I just finished a three day weekend over what they call the
"National Holiday." We went with a group of around 25 (10 of whom we already knew) to an area called Moganshan. Moganshan used to be a big expat summer house location, but that all ended during the Cultural Revolution. The tour group is called Bohdi Bikes, and it consisted of a full day of hiking (4 hours, 4 miles, and 2,500 ft of elevation) and then a full day of biking (4 hours, 26 miles, and 1000 ft of elevation). It was advertised as being for beginners, but thanks to the typhoon that hit the coast to the west of us, it was a little more intense than expected.

We were bussed 3.5 hours out of Shanghai early Saturday morning. We were dropped off with Dan, our western tour guide, and Orange and Vince, our Chinese tour guides. They weighed us down with bottled waters and sandwiches, gave us our first glimpse of how bad squat pots can get, and we set off. The first sight was a working coal mine.

Coal train

This guy unleashed an avalanche on us. Fortunately, no one was killed.

They store coal in this building.


A view of the town of Moganshan as we start to climb.

That first day we climbed stairs through a bamboo forest. Mist obscured the distant hills. Our tour guide said that it was normally much clearer, and blamed the fog on the typhoon.




We climbed a lot of these


I don't know anything interesting about this old Chinese house.


This rubble was a house owned by a German family. It's address is 210 (shout out).


Dan was feeling adventurous, so after about an hour and a half of hiking he proposed adding a loop that he claimed would take an extra hour or so. No one complained, so we kept going up hill.


The long hike option.

People paint their family names on the bamboo to claim territory.


Caution! Beware of Pandas.



Guai Shi = Strange Rock, Monster Rock, Surprised Rock, or Queer Stone


I was born in the year of the Pig, so I rubbed his ears for good luck.


This guy is drying tea in a heated metal bowl.


Washing your hands in this spring is supposed to bring wealth. It's even safe to drink.

Chinese tourists being carried around in chairs. They had numbers, like race cars.


This little guy made his dad come talk to us. I think he was afraid I was going to steal his walking stick. It would have been so easy...


Christine and I looking sweaty and gross.

A view of town from the top of the mountain.


We finished the extra "hour long" loop about 2.5 hours later, and our guide balked at hiring cabs to bring us to the hotel. We had started backtracking when the fog got noticeably thicker and it started pouring on us. We made it back to an old, toothless woman who had sold us water earlier in the day and Dan found a taxi driver who made a special trip to bring back a bus large enough for all of us.


Our hotel. The air conditioning dripped all over Christine during the night.

The hotel wouldn't win any awards, but it was comfortable enough for a night. Our guides cooked us Chinese style BBQ while we crammed into a stairwell to stay out of the rain. Christine and I met an interesting Finnish couple and got some valuable pointers on traveling through China. We tried to watch "The Big Lebowski," but the audio was messed up so everyone sounded like chipmunks. It was funny at first, but the Dude was not meant to sound like Alvin. I think everyone was asleep by 8:30.


Day 2 was bike day. We took fewer pictures, since the camera was stowed away in a backpack for most of the day. The ride started with a huge, fun downhill. We regrouped at the bottom, and Orange led us to the reservoir.

Christine and I on day 2, after the downhill. We were in the fast group, since we're so cool.

There were tons of tea fields around the reservoir.


We got lost in the tea field.


From far away, the tea fields look like grape fields.



Christine and I posing with Orange, the leader during part of the biking day. Like our helmets?


My friend Nichols and I. He teaches at SHSID too.



Christine's artistic vision.

After the reservoir, our path started going slightly uphill. Then it started raining. Then we went off road. Slogging through the mud got pretty difficult, and there were a few falls. By this time we knew that Dan was full of it every time he described the next section. Once we got through it there was a snack shop waiting, and 1 kuai could buy a bag of chips. That's a bag of chips for less than $0.15. As part of the tour, we were shown the pot plants which were growing on the side of the road.



Pot plants grow wild in Moganshan. Don't do drugs kids.

The last leg of the ride started by going through a dark tunnel through the hillside. Then we had a bunch of fun downhill switchbacks as we headed back to the town we had started day 1 from. They bussed us back to the hotel for showers and a Chinese style banquet (I'm already tired of being served a plate of crap [chicken feet, sea slugs, sea cucumbers, etc, etc] that both they and I know nobody is going to touch).

We were dropped off back in Shanghai by 7 on Sunday night. The trip was a great start to our traveling adventures here in China. We've been inspired to get bikes to ride around the city, hopefully expanding our stomping grounds in Shanghai, and maybe giving us a reason to keep exercising while we're here.

Now I really should get back to making my 6th grade MS Excel lesson plan. Do you know how hard it is to explain how Excel works to someone who can't understand "left click on the black line?" It's the kind of thing that's hilarious an hour or two later. When I'm actually saying, "No, that's a right click" for the fifteenth time, though... well, that's kind of aggravating.

-Jeremy