The Land of Rice and Green Tea

I saw this picture once when I was a teenager. It's been on my bucket list ever since.

Never really knew where it was though until I showed my good friend Jimmy Zheng. "Oh ya, that's Guilin. My parents went there on their honeymoon."

We did the math and realized there was a good chance this is also where the story of his life began... awkward pause...

Still on my bucket list though, so off I go to see it! I'll try just to avoid that hotel!

I'm going to be behind the Great Firewall of China for the next 2 weeks, so no guarantees I'll be doing my usual travel blog. No Facebook. No Twitter. Not sure about BlogSpot. I think email is ok, so I've set this up to be able to post via email. Won't be able to edit that and make it look pretty. Heck, no guarantees it'll even work.

So if you don't hear from me for 2 weeks, below is the itinerary of roughly where I'll be. If you don't hear from me in 3 weeks, send hel... actually, never mind. I've had a good run.

The Itinerary:

- start in Shanghai where I'll meet my G Adventures group. The G is starting to stand for Greg, I've done so many trips with these guys. Always a great group of people and painless but adventure-filled travel style.

- Next is Hangzhou, where we'll visit a tea plantation and get to pick and make our own tea

- Then Guilin, where we'll rent bikes and ride along the Yangshou country side for a couple days, and perhaps even join the local fisherman for a bizarre but traditional fishing experience (Google it, it's pretty unique!). Also, I'm probably butchering the spelling of all these places, but my flight boards in 5 minutes, so meh.

- 2 day cruise up the Yangzee River ending at the Three Gorges Dam. I'm surprisingly excited to see that. It's said it's so large that when they filled it with water if shifted the earth's center of gravity enough to move the axis a couple inches!

- Then Xi'an for the Terracotta Warriors. If that wasn't good enough, I'll also be ducking out of the tour for a day here to go climb Mt. Huashan! (i.e. this thing)

If I do go missing, this will likely be the spot where it happened. :)

- Finally an overnight train to Beijing, as no tour to China would be complete without seeing the real Great Wall, Forbidden City, and eating some Peking Duck.

Boarding Time! By for good. I mean, now.

Greg