My recent travels put me out of the camper and into an airplane. Since this isn't an overlanding report I'll certainly understand if the moderators yank it off here but I thought I'd post since to me it's an update on my travels in between trips in the camper. I was going to post up on my blogsite
www.nowheretobetour.blogspot.com but can't seem to get into the update section. Anyway, I got the chance to accompany my wife on a business trip to China. When I found out I could get a round trip flight for $510 I was in. We ended up going to about four different cities and the surrounding countryside. While in the interior section we would go days without seeing another foreigner. You get quite a bit of stares here when they aren't use to seeing foreigners. Even had some of them want to take our picture with them standing beside us. Now I'm not one for crowded places, and China certainly qualifies as crowded with 1.4 billion people running around but I will say that the trip was very interesting and I had no regrets about going. I'll just post up a bunch of pictures here with a brief explanation as to what was going on.
Panda's at the Chendung Panda Sanctuary. All of the Panda's here had been rescued in the wild. The first picture is of an older bear with only three legs. He was discovered in the wild with severe injuries and had to have the leg amputated. We signed up for a volunteer program for the day and got to go behind the scenes. We did have to clean the pens, enclosures but also got to hand feed the bears and hang out with their handlers for the day. There are only about 1500 Pandas remaining in the wild and these areas are closed off to anyone other than research teams. Seeing one in the wild is pretty unlikely.
I would get up early every morning and walk the streets. If one is into street photography this is the place to be. You could see everything from a goat being slaughtered to an impromtu barbershop popping up in some alley.
Or maybe an ear wax removal vendor. You would find these guys in the parks removing ear wax. They'd poke around in there with some funky looking instruments, pull out a hunk of wax and then go back at it.
The people of China do not live in a bubble wrapped society such as ours. They just make it happen, damn any traffic laws. I could spend hours justing sitting on a curb somewhere watching different rigs come by. You see it all over there.
Some night shots in the city of Guanzhou along the Pearl River. Population of about 20 million. Be thankful we live here in the states. We've got combined states out west that don't have that many people.
Place called the Stone Forest in the interior portion of China. Interesting place where just like the name implies, you felt as if you were walking through a forest of stone.
Some random shots of the Chinese people.......
I took over 2000 pics in two weeks and not sure I'll ever get around to processing them all but thought I'd throw some of them up here. Hopefully, I'm not breaking some cardinal rule and they don't get flagged. If not, I may post up some more a little later. I'm headed off to Baja in three weeks so I'll be back in the camper soon enough.
