This morning’s run was an easy paced 11-12 km run. My usual route through town to the river, then alongside the river and back through a couple of parks to home, stopping off to buy breads and tea eggs en route. The last kilometre or so were spent with Puppy – came back to grab her for her ‘walk’. Attempted a run or jog with her, but she is too easily distracted and jolts me unexpectedly to a stop by pretty much every tree. (There are a lot of trees in this town.)

 

Lately we’ve been thinking, talking about and planning our ‘amazing caravan around China adventure’, so I’d thought I’d share a little more re: the places we are aiming to visit.

We are hiring a caravan (plus a car and driver to tow it and us) for 28 days and during this time we are aiming to visit 6 new provinces, and many many beautiful places. The first stop being Mount Lushan, in Jiangxi province, some 535kms from here, closely followed by the amazing Poyang Lake (a HUGE freshwater lake, the biggest in China I think).

We want to visit some ancient villages, known as Hui Villages, and thus head to Anhui province to see and hike up and down yet more beautiful mountainous areas. So far: Huangshan and Jiuhuashan are on our list here:

From there, we will head over to Henan province and check out the very famous Shaolin Temple, Longmen Caves, and White Horse temple:

Then it’s on to Xian in Shaanxi province, to check out the thousands of terracotta warriors:

We then hope to drive up and into Shanxi province to visit the ancient walled town of Pingyao, and then check out some cave locations at Lijiashan and the Yungang Caves:

From here it’s up into our new province – Inner Mongolia – where we’ll be spending the next year teaching in a university, but before we arrive at our destination we want to visit the town of Hohhot and Xilinhot and then the majestic, vast grasslands and beautiful scenery and people at Hulunbeier:

To say we’re a little bit excited would be a huge understatement. Can. Not. Wait. Not sure how much access to internet we’ll have while we’re travelling and on the road, so if you don’t hear from me much in July and August, you’ll know why.

 

If anyone is reading this has been to China and can recommend other places that are worth a visit or that you loved, please get in touch! Would love to hear your experiences and what you thought of some great places to see.

Call the police, I just killed my run! Haha, yes, I know you're not laughing at my excellent joke. Oh well... Just got back from  my long run of the week, which I think was about 25km (again, not very good at charging the Garmin it seems), and took in two different mountainous park areas with hundreds of steps. One of these is the BIG one at the end of town where I did lots of training for the Great Wall race, as I reckoned that some of the steep steps would be a good practice run for the Great Wall (oh how wrong I was haha), and Garmin (which was working at that point) reckoned it is about 400m up to the top. (I think there are about 660 ish steps? I'll count next time...) Anyway, I hadn't been here in quite a while, but it seemed a lot easier than the last time. Or maybe it is because I had already run for 10kms and ran some steps and hills so was more warmed up than usual? Whatever it was, it saw me being able to run further up the steps than ever before and then keep on hiking up the last extremely steep section without stopping for a break (last year I needed a couple of short breaks). So, yay for that.

Now, am off to shower and seek out a mammoth breakfast. Enjoy your Saturday people!