The R & R That Wasn’t, Part 3 – Wuzhishan

By the time we arrived back home in Wuzhishan we were all pretty much exhausted so had a lazy day at home. In the evening we began binge watching ‘24’ which we continued most nights until we headed off down south again. The second day was much more of the same but we did go down to San Yue San square in the evening. The other three had a go at walking on the cobbles. It’s supposed to be good for you! My dainty little feet are far too sensitive, well, apart from the calluses caused by flip flops!

On the third day in Wuzhishan we decided that our guests needed to have some exercise and took them to ‘Wuzhishan Park’. It’s not so much a park as a walk, up the hill!

As long as the weather is good and it hasn’t been raining in the last couple of days it is quite a beautiful walk. Our guests must have been even more tired than we were though because they couldn’t make it to the hotel and only got as far as this spot. I was a lovely place to stop and have our butties though!

My son is as bad as me for taking photos. The rest of the family always think he takes too many. I just keep them all. Here’s a small sample. First, the ‘wall trees’

Followed by the local wildlife, another way he takes after me:

Finally, one that really cheese me off and I suspect he wasn’t too impressed either. What can we do to teach people to take their rubbish home with them?

The next day, (9^th April) wasn’t so lazy. We started off the day with a walk by the river. I really do love the trees down there. In some ways they remind me of stories, such as The Lord Of The Rings.

During our saunter we came across a house being built. Nothing there to surprise me but my son had never seen bamboo scaffolding before.

Later on we took them up to the hotel which we had failed to walk to the day before. This time we drove to make sure we could fit in everything we wanted to do in one day. It’s quite a beautiful spot as can be seen in the following pictures but it is not maintained as it should be.

As usual my son was clicking away like mad and just to prove it, here’s a little more wildlife! And yes, the monkeys are in the hotel, not on Monkey Island.

We carried on our drive and went all the way down the mountain just so we could drive up again, up another road, which took us to the reservoir. If you walk up there it will take you one and half to two hours but it is well worth it. You can walk up through the forest, or take the road, I don’t think there’s much difference in the walking time. The views are nice. On this occasion, there were no cows wandering around inside the (drinking water) reservoir!

The others had a ‘snack’ at the top, rice cooked inside bamboo. Here is Huan teaching everyone how to do it:

And here’s my son tucking in:

Of course we couldn’t escape without more ‘wildlife’ pictures so here they are, albeit not so wild.

On our way down we spotted this. I explained that the workers were actually doing two jobs, repairing the typhoon damage and widening the road a little.

Still on the same day, ooh, it was a busy one, we managed to sort out a tea ceremony which was something my son had asked specifically to see. There isn’t really anything like that in Wuzhishan but one of the tea shop owners arranged it for us, even including traditional dress for the young lady. It was very cheap by tourism standards and we could have stayed as long as we liked.

Evening, after quite a tiring day, saw us eating hotpot. What is it with Hainan? We seem to see even more hotpots here than we did in Harbin where at least the weather is cold! We had to take them to this one though, it had a conveyor belt!

Chris did his usual, digging up yet another animal photo. Did you know you can’t get rid of ‘red eye’ on animal photos?

April 10^th saw us leaving the family behind and going back to Sanya. I needed to change some pension sterling into living Yuan! Although the bank had been open when we were in Sanya, the ‘right person’ hadn’t been there because of ‘Qing Ming Festival. I’m sure the rest was well appreciated by them and of course, a little break from us, to explore Wuzhishan alone.

We did have one more evening in Wuzhishan but that will be covered in the next entry!