Home Again, New Year, Long Walks, Falling Over, Pictures Galore

February 9^th Twin beds were the order of the day, or should that read night, yesterday. Huan asked for a ‘big bed’ room but the receptionist must have misunderstood. This morning we were both late waking up. Coincidence? For now we’ll stick to our enormous bed at home.

Huan’s promised weather had arrived, it was raining. Breakfast was a quick run(?) around to the back of the hotel where I had tofu soup, it was not much to write home about! I didn’t like Huan’s either, she had rice soup. Luckily steamed dumplings were on hand, one pork and one veggie for Huan, one pork and one beef for me. We spent the rest of the morning back in the hotel room.

Having to be out by noon we had a little drive around and visited the next island to Haidian Dao, we think it’s called Xinbu island. There were hundreds of villas there, all in various states of construction or repair/disrepair. Work appeared to have stopped in some areas, and not for the New Year by the looks of it. We decided it could well be worth another visit if we ever win the lottery! Who knows, by then there may be some for sale.

Our monthly shop was next, stocking up on butter, cheese and sandwich meat mostly; they had no bratwurst this month. Never mind, it’s New Year, Huan will be force feeding me for the next week! From there, to waste time, we went back to Carrefour, mostly window shopping, and had our lunch there.

Back to the hospital just before three, and lo and behold, my results were ready. It’s very efficient, you just go to a machine, enter your patient number, and it prints them out for you. They’re in my bag at the moment but at a cursory glance they look OK. I’ll check them properly tomorrow when I scan them.

By now the rain was really coming down. Off back to Wuzhishan we headed, it took us over an hour to get out of Haikou, everybody and his dog was on the move. I guess lots of people are already heading home for the holidays. The highway was almost as bad but at least we could keep moving, weaving in and out of the slow ones in the “fast lane” and the others in the “slow lane”. Many of the number plates were mainland registered, probably off to Sanya where it’s warmer. We’ve never seen it so busy, even the rest stop had more people and cars than usual. You’ll notice a lot of people standing around outside, there wasn’t enough room for them inside! Note also that it had stopped raining, long enough for us to have a quick break. It started again once we were back on the road playing dodgems again.

Needless to say, laziness set in once we got home!

February 10^th Rain rained all night but rain stopped raining when we got up. Before breakfast I gave Sprog his first job of the day to see how he would cope with the mountains making rain. He didn’t do so badly, here’s a cropped view.

After breakfast my first job of the day was given to me, help Huan with the New Year decorations. I quite like the ones we put up in the house, in some ways I prefer them to the Christmas decorations. The window ones have me sitting on the fence a little though.

Now we come to the outside of the house where I usually put my foot down and only put this one on the front door.

However, this year, Yu had given us a pair of rhyming couplets which is what you see on most doors. In fact most families keep them up until the next New Year. I don’t particularly like the mess left by the sticky backing on the walls and/or door. Because Yu has been going to character writing lessons and she made these herself I guess Huan felt obliged to use them. She has promised me that she will take them down after a month though.

No time for relaxing, as soon as the New Year jobs were done I had to chauffeur Madame to the supermarket, a job I quite like normally. Unlike most stereotypical husbands, I actually enjoy going shopping, most of the time. My enjoyment levels drop considerably when the supermarket is full, even more so just before New Year’s Eve. I had to restrain myself from reacting, more than once, when I was roughly pushed out of the way. Still, needs must, as they say, and at least we’re all sorted for our own New Year now.

After dinner the final bit of sorting, for me, was done, Huan took me to visit the sausage man! Just in case I get peckish over the next few days, which is highly doubtful, we stocked up on both chicken and pork sausages. Huan’s work wasn’t finished of course, she was busy in the kitchen preparing for tomorrow. PS Shorts are out, longs are back!

February 11^th We woke up to sunshine again today, not warm, but at least it wasn’t raining. The weather is all over the place at the moment, up and down like the proverbial you know who’s britches! At eleven last night it was down to 14ºC, forecast to go down to 10ºC, and it was 16ºC when we went out this morning. It did get up to 21ºC early afternoon so we can’t really complain. This morning’s walk was mostly to give Huan a little relaxation before she got busy with today’s dinner. The first thing we noticed was that our bins are overflowing, not good for the day before the holiday starts! We popped down to the town square, took a photo of the totem pole for you, surrounded by its New Year flowerpots.

The town was beginning to quieten down, the New Year decoration stalls were packing up to go home, the stalls for the children were still open though, popguns, darts, hoops etc. With not a great deal to photograph we took photos of each other instead!

Arriving home, as expected, the bins hadn’t been emptied. You can see that we have two bins, for six nine storey buildings, each approximately fifty apartments, and a couple of dozen villas. Granted we are never at full occupancy but all the same, one bin per building for the apartments and a couple of extras for the villas would be far better. It all comes down to money it seems, the local municipality take the rubbish away but our maintenance company provides the bins. “They don’t have enough income from the tenants to buy anymore at the moment.” I’d be willing to buy one bin but I don’t think the Minister of Finance would allow me to!

Huan was a busy bee after lunch, working miracles in the kitchen, as she always does for New Year. I had told her that she could keep it as simple as she wanted this year, with only two of us. Did she listen? You know the answer already, don’t you? This is the spread, seen from both ends of the table, eleven dishes, and all, apart from the duck, cooked with one small induction hob. (We still have no gas.)

We did try and take our usual Christmas / New Year ‘toast’ photograph but I couldn’t get the hang of holding the phone in my left hand, and a long stemmed glass in my right hand. I think I need to investigate my phone a little further. Instead, Huan decided it would be fine to just take a photo of me wishing you a Happy New Year on the balcony. We both forgot the New Year decoration on the window, and Huan didn’t notice that is was causing strange red shading over various parts of my face! This was the least affected photo, Happy New Year all!

Now I would have been quite happy to do nothing after dinner, but Huan insisted we have a walk. It was a quiet one, nearly everything was closed. However, we did see more people than we would usually see at this time of the year. Only one was dressed up though, guess who?

What would New Year’s Eve be without a power failure? At least it was only a few minutes, it didn’t disturb my watching Taskmaster for too long!

February 12^th Well, the weather turned again and we awoke to a miserable morning so we decided to stay in and do not a lot. As luck would have it though, the weather turned again and we had ‘shorts’ weather back in the afternoon. Being New Year’s Day the garbage trucks were not working so we took a walk over the landfill mountain, no dust to bother us. And, being the year of the Ox, the first two photos show the cows coming into town, perhaps they are on holiday too. At least they are not on somebody’s plate yet! Note how they are all ‘driving’ on the correct side of the road.

One reason for taking the landfill route today was to check on the progress of the highway, it seems that Huan’s info was wrong, it’s not completed yet. Here’s what we see when we come down the entry ramp at the moment, we won’t come down this way once it’s done.

As usual, far too many photographs were taken so we’ll just select a few, first of all, some of the scenery on the way up to the first village. You can see the dearth of traffic and you may also notice that Huan was overdressed.

Near the first village we could walk onto the highway, it’s not far off completion by the looks of it. The latest info we have is that it should be open by then end of March or maybe sometime in April. That looks highly likely. The first picture is looking back towards Wuzhishan and the second is looking towards Baoting.

From here we continued, uphill, but surprisingly we weren’t feeling too bad. It’s so long since we walked any hills I thought we would be struggling. Not far from where we started to go down again we came to the last village on this road. We could hear a little noise but as you can see, the place looked deserted.

That last panorama was created from three normal (16:9) photos and stitched by me. This next one was created by Sprog. It’s not too bad although the colours across the fishpond didn’t come out as well as I would have liked.

Just over five kilometres in we saw the sight we like, the peak of our ascent, from here it’s downhill all the way home, about another three kilometres.

On the way down we noticed that quite a bit of the undergrowth at the roadside had been pruned so we were able to take this next shot for you. Like many other places in the world, the buildings you can see in the centre, yellowish with brown roofs, are just slightly misnamed. That complex is called “Shangri La”, you can see why I’m sure.

The scenery coming down is well suited to walking, lots of bends in the road, plenty of trees giving shade, and views over the city. However, I’m not going to show you any of those today. Instead I’ll show you someone I fell in love with. I’m fairly sure that I could have picked him up and carried him home with me, he wouldn’t have minded at all. SWMBO on the other hand would have been most displeased and I would probably have been banished to the studio apartment in Sanya along with the cat. Searching on Google didn’t help me much, he doesn’t appear to be much like anything I can name, maybe you can help me.

Let’s finish off today’s piccies with another selfie, here we are at the end of our walk. Sprog tells us that we’ve walked 8.1km and taken 12,769 steps to do it, who are we to argue.

After all that exercise all we did for the rest of the day was eat leftover New Year food and relax.

February 13th We had planned a reservoir walk for today but laziness stepped in and took command. Huan sat in the living room doing music homework and I sat in the office scanning medical reports, bills etc and filing them. My PSA results are fine, nothing to worry about there. I also brought my excel bank file up to date, wishing that the balance would show continuous growth instead of the ups and downs it does show.

In the afternoon we continued in the same vein but with much less work! Dinner was just like yesterday’s, leftover duck and vegetables from our New Year dinner. I must admit it was nice to have a relaxing day and we did go out for an after dinner walk. With Huan having no dancing or Hulusi practice we decided to walk to the last bridge before turning round. First we crossed our very own park island. In this view, historically the river would flow around the little rocky island you can see before continuing towards our house. It will be interesting to see if they do anything with all the rubble that is now blocking the way.

We’re still using Sprog to take pictures at the moment, what he did with this next one I don’t know. It looks like he has learned how to trace mountains and clouds.

We’ve lived here for over five years now and as you know, we walk a lot, even over the New Year holidays. This year was different, we still walked, but we were no longer alone. It would appear that many people followed the advice of not going anywhere for the holidays and also that some many grandchildren came down here to visit their snowbird grandparents. You may think that these photos do not show crowds, trust me, at this time of the year it’s usually just Huan, myself and a handful of other people.

Inside the town itself, the roads were far more deserted, apart from the one in the middle with funfair type activities for the children.

Not a bad after dinner walk, we took 11,304 steps and walked 7.1km. (I’m still not sure how these steps are worked out, seems a bit on the high side to me.) It is good to be getting out and about with my favourite PTI, at least she doesn’t make me walk too fast, her little legs are just that wee bit shorter than my “too long for my body” legs.

February 14^th Sleep was not so bad last night, I haven’t slept well for quite a few nights before yesterday. The problem wasn’t fireworks, most people have heeded the advice of the Wuzhishan government and not bothered with them. In fact they didn’t have the usual stalls on the other side of the river selling them this year. No, what’s been keeping me awake is an injury, again. If you are a regular reader you may remember sometime in the past I ‘popped’ a rib grovelling under the sofa for something. Well, I did it again during the spring cleaning, not under the sofa this time but under the bed. I was reaching for something that Huan had pushed right into the middle when all of a sudden, ‘pop’, I did it again, on my right side near the top this time. Breathing is fine but sneezing or coughing is quite painful. I’ve been doing my usual and ignoring it, doctors can’t do much when it’s your ribs anyway, but sleep was getting to be a problem. Last night I tried a couple of Chinese headache pills and either they had an effect or I was just so tired that I slept through the pain.

The weather smiled on us again today and although we weren’t up very early, we were early enough for our walk up to the reservoir and back. All the photos you will see are on the way up, we came down the same way so there was no point taking even more. Here’s the beginning.

This signpost marks the spot where we are nearly three kilometres away from home, the worst hill is behind us but there are still a few more hills on the way.

Now there are three photos looking back the way we came and up the way we are going. I wanted to create a six photo panorama, this first one comprises the first three.

The second one comprises the second three.

You can see that Huan is there in both of those photos. Stitching together the two panoramas to make the third, Huan disappears somewhere. You can just about see the bottoms of her legs.

Lots of photos of mirrors were taken to show you the bends and the ups and downs.

Next up is another panorama, this time of the new bridge and created by Sprog. If you look carefully the bridge parapet is not quite straight, that’s down to my wobble holding of the phone.

Now, if you look even more carefully. at the end of the bridge, there’s a small slip road off to the right. Huan decided we should go up there today, and back down to continue up to the big reservoir. This road leads to a small reservoir, the one where a cow got friendly with me once upon a time. Huan had forgotten how steep this small road is!

It was probably the most tiring part of today’s walk, even more so than the beginning. What made it even worse was seeing this when we reached the top, there was no way in to see the small reservoir! At least we were able to stop the people behind us going the same way.

At last, the last mirror before the reservoir!

Some more panoramas at the top, as you can see the snowbirds are out in force. The two standing on the wall were friends of Huan, I left her talking to them while I went ahead.

The next two are just the reservoir, either side of the ‘hut’ in the middle. If you remember, the last time I came up here we seemed to be a little short of water, no such problems today though.

Huan hadn’t caught me up by the time I took the summit selfies, just so that you know we are not cheating, so you have two of me instead, one with Wuzhishan in the distance and one with the reservoir behind me.

Smiley Face wasn’t too far behind me, she was sitting on the wall having a quick breather.

Coming down was a great deal easier than going up I can tell you, I really enjoyed it, good walking weather, downhill and Huan for company, what more could I need. And that was it for our day, I did have the possibility of an after dinner walk in my mind, but we both decided we’d done enough for one day. According to Sprog we had walked 13.7km, strange figure, we thought it should have been well over 14km with the extra bit in the middle. As for the steps, many today, 21,025, I think that’s enough for one day, especially as half of them were uphill!

February 15^th My legs were feeling very stiff this morning, Huan’s were fine, it must be the age difference! Both of us were a little late getting up so we decided the morning walk was off the cards and we would do a walk to the countryside down Changhao way in the afternoon. My idea was that we would have a little more shade from the sun that way. This is the road out of town towards Changhao, as you can see, a lovely day for it.

Not far before the highway turn off we spotted a new “no right turn” sign, we thought it may have been old or misplaced. Upon reaching the highway turn off we found a definitely new “no entry” sign. I foresee quite a few accidents in this area until people get used to it.

Not much further we passed two lonely firework tents, obviously selling from outside the town because they’re not allowed to sell inside. Mind you, two is a darn sight less than the ten to twelve we used to have. Not long after, with Huan feeling the heat, I said “Don’t worry darling, we’ll be in the countryside in a few minutes, lots of shade from the trees.” I was wrong!

Heading back towards the main road we decided to try the side of the river.

We were doing quite well until we came to this.

Being ever the intrepid adventurers we found a way to help each other across the fence and through the overhanging branches to see our way forward. Do you like the tree?

The tree didn’t like me! The ground underfoot was quite dry in places, we haven’t had a great deal of rain recently, and whatever I stepped on gave way propelling me forward at a rapid rate of knots. With my brain racing, as it does in these situations, I grabbed hold of the branches on the right hand side of the above tree. Being as dry as everything else, they snapped and sent me hurtling to the ground. There are no photos or videos of me falling but Huan took sixteen snaps of me getting up again, which I made into a gif, just for you. Hopefully it will work on the Blog, if not, here I am wondering what’s going on.

We live and learn don’t we, or at least some of us do, not including me! The reason we were on this side of the river is because I didn’t think Huan would have been able to walk over the weir you see here. My boots are waterproof enough and I’ve done it before, Huan’s aren’t.

This is one of our favourite little villages and one of the many spots we would buy a house near, if only we were allowed to.

This village, small though it is, even has a signboard with a map and village information.

What was nice to see today was whole families enjoying their New Year reunions, I guess village life is much more traditional than city life. Our last picture, in the New Year vein, is one of those bovine beasts again. In this case, the farmer kept telling me not to touch the cow or it would attack me. I’m not sure if she’d already me seen me stroking its head! Anyway, I took her advice and stayed just a little bit away after that.

By the time we got home my legs were asking me what I thought I was doing to them and even Huan was starting to feel the pain. Today’s walk was shorter than yesterday’, only 10.3km, but I guess a lot more difficult at times. Between us, we decided tomorrow would be a rest day, only an after dinner walk would be taken.

I thought I would even get back to guitar practice tomorrow, I doubt if my left wrist is going to change much more than it has over the last three months. Even my ribs are improving, so strumming would be fine. However, when the jungle attacked me, I think I may have sprained my left thumb so no holding down chords for me for a few more days. Chinese lessons and Youtube will have to be enough to keep me happy!

Well, I hope your New Year has been memorable, whether it’s been indoors or outdoors, locked down or not locked down. Huan and I wish you all a glorious year to come, may you have all that you wish for and all you so surely deserve. Bye for now, see you next week.