Dear all,
How are you? What are you upto this weekend? Here are some of what we were upto in rural China recently.
First of all, I’d like to commend my beautiful guests once again for volunteering in cleaning up mountains and coasts in rural China! They are very dedicated and thorough, earned us great respect, compliments, presents and good snacks and food (we were given Chinese paintings done by the Head of the local gallery, who was very touched by our actions, the mooncakes after volunteering tasted the best).
To the locals, we were not tourists, we were guests and friends. In some of these photos, you’ll see them cleaning up the mountains along with enjoying sceneries and wildflowers. In future blogs, I’ll post the coastal cleanup photos.
As you see in the photos, we had a feel of selling fresh harvest from the mountains, there we bought walnuts, jujube, huge peaches, also bought rare expensive medicinal bracket fungi – Lingzhi, wild in the mountain, which was gifted to the local ladies who cooked many meals for us.
Papercutting is a delicate time-consuming folk artform that is not well inherited, each papercutting has a story/symbolic meaning to it. We did a cactus flower as well as an apple, some creative guest discovered clever way to decorate a shaved head with this auspicious red.
The guests tried out the traditional wedding cart, I wasn’t there that time, they worked it out themselves, all had a go and good laugh. Just to note, normally it’s the lady sitting in the cart, men (2-8 men) carrying the cart.
Food is being grown everywhere on village streets. Our engineer guest was inspired by the long lofa, and engineered it into his mouth.
One of the guests is a talented dancer, tried out traditional Chinese dances without much lagging behind… and of course there were moments we all laughed.
Do you see the giant broom that the popular TV presenter Costa Georgiadis find meditative about! Come meditating with it in each sweep action in rural China J.
We’ve done a whole lot more things than these, I’ll do another blog on activities after the next accommodation blog (such as scorpion catching, foraging, fish-net mending, rope making)
Please note that for 2019 bookings made by November 2018, you’ll get $200 off the tour price, and if you happen to book fast enough to make the 3rd booking for April tour (2 places taken already), or the first 3 bookings for September tour, you’d be able to enjoy $300 off.
And if you’d like a longer tour and would like to experience ancient China, please also join me in April 6th– 16th for 11 days in southern China before Rural China Tour April on 18th – 27th. The “”Step into Ancient China” would be about Ancient Chinese Gardens, silk and tea making, bamboo digging, cooking and crafting, rice growing, cloth dying, lots of picturesque ancient villages and mountains and rivers… and ancient Chinese culture, including umbrella making, fan making, opera singing, particularly paper making, paint brush making, ink and ink stone making etc. I’ll also include Chinese medicinal herb garden and Chinese medicine museum experiences in this trip. You can check out some beautiful images on google about this destination.