Travel update

Hello lovely visitors, thanks for dropping by.
Today I have a post of a more personal nature to share, as so many of you have asked for a travel update....

I had an amazing two weeks in China, first teaching at a conference for primray school teachers and then a week holiday at the foot of one of China's 4 holy mountains, Emei-Shan about 2 hours by bullet train from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, SE China.

The photos are all from that second week as during the conference I was so busy I never got round to taking photos, though my lovely students must have taken hundreds (literally) of selfies with me, - I felt like a celebrity lol...

Here goes:

At the foot of the mountain (to walk to the summit is a full two days' hike, which in temperatures of between 35 and 40 degrees and about 100% humidity, we did not attempt)... As this is a holy mountain there are at least 20 Buddhist temples along the way. We hiked up to some of the closer ones, but planned to take a bus and cable car to the summit.

Entrance to the temple at the foot of the mountain, elephants are a big feature in many of them.

Front view of the entrance with a huge bell (similar to many we saw in Japan during an earlier trip this year)

One of the many, many Buddha statues surrounding the temples. This one was simply carved out of the surrounding rock face.There were also many Buddha statues, often covered in gold cladding, inside the temples but the lighting was never quite right to get a reasonable photo.

The roof of another temple as you can probably see

Chinese food in China is very, very different from the Chinese take out we knew from home. Having it for breakfast lunch and dinner took some getting used to!

Everything was kept spotlessly clean though, and people are super friendly, and like I said, always keen to take a photo of these strange looking Europeans.

We met these ladies on one of our hikes close to the top of the mountain, hubby took a quick photo of them as they were photographing us. I even had to pose with a special hat I received as a gift :o)

As it so happened, we never actually made it to the top of the mountain, as it was covered in a thick layer of cloud and completely overun with (Chinese) tourists.

These beautiful monkeys were everywhere near the summit, but as you can see it was so misty up there we could barely see 10 metres ahead, it was also a lot cooler.

I'll leave you with a few photos of my travel notebook, I had prepared at home. (I had to do a lot of doodling as I only had few craft supplies accessable while travelling).

Pfew, if you are still with me, thanks for your visit. While in China I was unable to access any social media sites including blogger because of their strickt censoring laws, but now I am in Australia, I'll try and visit you whenever time allows...

xxxxx