Salomon

My Digital Scrapbook:
I woke up very early, at 3:30. I got about 5 hours of sleep. Compared to the other people it was good. I picked up Daniel on the way to our school by taxi. We had to wait 5 minutes for the bus to come. I slept a lot in the bus. We arrived in the wrong terminal. Joe knew it, but no one listened to him. When everyone took out his or her suitcases, I realized my suitcase was the smallest one. I thought I had under packed. The flight trip was about 4 hours to Kunming. The flight trip felt longer than that.
 * Day 1, Monday March 23rd:**

When we arrived in Kunming, we had to check in our luggage and go through security again before catching the next flight. The flight to Lijiang had been delayed. The flight trip to Lijiang was very short, less than one hour. Melody who lost her boarding pass had to take another flight. Nina and our suitcases also took the other flight. There was a lot of air turbulence, so I felt a bit ill. Everyone was happy when we arrived in Lijiang. The weather was perfect, a lot of sunshine and a blue sky. The air was much fresher than in Shanghai. We met our tour guide called Hamlet and took a bus to the Black Dragon Pool and had lunch. I learnt the meaning of Lijiang, which means beautiful river. I ate a new type of tofu, which tasted really good. After lunch we walked around in the Black Dragon Pool Park. It was a beautiful park. I took a lot of photos. There were very nice pagodas.

We had dinner in a restaurant called Little Paris. I think the dinner tasted better than lunch. After we had eaten we played with darts. My best score was 24 with three darts. After dinner, we went to the Naxi Orchestra. It was an hour and I was impressed by the music, but the all the music sounded the same. I haven't seen most of the instruments. Most of the people performing were above eighty years old. I got very tired afterwards. We walked back to our hotel. It was very dark in the hotel. I wrote my journal and took a quick shower in the hotel. The hotel was 4 stars, but me and my roommate Daniel thought it was 5 stars.

We had a wake up call at around 7 in the morning. My camera's alarm didn't work because I left it on silent mode. I had breakfast. Today was another sunny day. We took the bus to a place where we had to wait for taking another bus to the cable car lifts for the Snow Mountain. I took the time for the bus ride and did my math homework. We had to wait for hours, so we had an early lunch. I wasn’t very hungry. We took the other bus to the cable car lifts.
 * Day 2, Tuesday March 24th:**

The cable cars were fast and went high above the ground. Most people were scared. The cable car ride took about 8 minutes. I thought it was fun, it felt like a roller coaster. The cable car took us really high up. It wasn’t very cold on the mountain, although there was a lot of snow. My ears cracked a lot. I went all the way to the top, 4680 meters above sea level. I didn’t need any extra oxygen. The air was very thin, but fresh. I got exhausted quickly when i went up to the top. It was very hard to breath. I took some group photos. It was beautiful weather and scenery from the top. We had to go down after half an hour. I didn't get headache but felt dizzy. I had never been so high up on the ground before.

We went to a local school in Lijiang. Both our school and the local school had performances, although our school wasn’t prepared for it. Jimmy performed a really funny performance, because the keyboard was too small. We met some students from the local school, who showed us around. Their school was much bigger then our school. Me and Kenneth talked with 3 of the students and they were all girls and older than us. The school was a boarding school. The students' school starts at 7 and ends at 10. I got a lot of homework done with the help from the local students. I learnt words in the Naxi language. They also told us more about the city. I learnt that the population is 200,000. We had a group photo of our and their school. We went to a restaurant with western food, although I thought the food was more Chinese, except the pizza. Daniel and Naomie were arguing how to say pizza correctly. After the dinner, the guides were briefing about the next days trekking in the gorges. We went back to the hotel. I took a shower. We then had some shopping and walking around in the Old Town. There were no roads in the Old Town. Yuki and Chloe were shopaholics; they stopped almost at every shop. I bought some souvenirs and presents. I finished packing my suitcases and wrote my journal. At the end of the day, I got a lot of headache and fell asleep quickly.

Woke up at 7:30 and felt very tired. I had a short breakfast. We had a two-hour bus trip to a small village called Qiaotou. We split up in groups. We started our trekking and quickly got dirty. Daniel convinced me to eat a plant which he said was eatable, but we are not sure if the teachers were just joking. It might be poisonous. I dropped my sunglasses in the dirt. Horses followed us. After one hour the groups were really far away from each other. I walked with Jeffrey and Wayne, my two group members. We met Mr. Sein on the way. He then had to walk back and look for some people who were behind the horses. We walked for two hours and had lunch in a Naxi family restaurant and had a break for 45 min. I drank more than what I ate. Tim sprayed axe on my shirt. It was really strong. Then we had another 3 hours of trekking. It was a lot of zigzag pattern uphill, about 28 zigzag turns. We had to take a lot of breaks on the way. Then we walked downhill. It was also very tiring. I walked with Kenneth and Yuki. I had lost my group.
 * Day 3, Wednesday March 25th:**

We finally reached the hotel in the evening. Almost all the other people had arrived. We saw something really disgusting outside the hotel. It was like dissected chicken. (no more details) I took a shower when Daniel and me got our room. The dinner was ok. I felt extremely tired after all trekking. I was ready to sleep any second, but we still had the bonfire and dancing. I felt like rather sleeping. We saw some small dogs, which got a lot of attention. It was a mother dog and her son. We didn't see the dad for the puppy. I wrote a little in my journal before the bonfire. I was too tired for dancing around the bonfire. I went to bed early, and decided to finish writing my journal the next day. It was the worst night ever. A lot of people were talking so I couldn’t sleep. It felt like the rooms didn't have any walls. I could even hear someone brushing his or her teeth. My sleep was delayed 2 hours. When I was just about to sleep, my mom called me, and woke me up. I didn't have any idea at what time I actually fell asleep.

My camera alarm woke me up at 7 o clock. The breakfast was some kind of pancake with apple and banana inside. A lot of people were sick this morning. They had stomach ache. It was cold in the morning. We had 4 hours of trekking to Tina's guesthouse. Jeffrey found a trekking stick for me. There were a lot of waterfalls on the way. There was a big one crossing the path, so we had to go over one by one. Most of the path was downhill. There were a lot of pipelines following the path. After an hour of walking downhill, I felt like rather walking uphill. It got warmer. We had a short break halfway of the trekking. I ate a lot of snacks. The lunch was good, with some good chicken. We took some minibuses back to Qiaotou village. There had been some rockslides on the road, so our minibus had to stop and drive slowly. We got a closer look at the Tiger Leaping Gorge from the minibuses.
 * Day 4, Thursday March 26th:**

When we arrived in Qiaotou, we took our big bus that we had before. The bus drove us back to Lijiang. The bus ride was 2 hours. I slept the entire time. We got new rooms in the hotel. This time the bathroom's lock worked. We got an hour for free time. I first took a shower and then went outside shopping with friends. I forgot to bring my map, but fortunately I didn't get lost. We didn't have much time for shopping. We had only half an hour of shopping, because we went out late. I didn’t buy something. I met my brother's group on the way. All of them had bought a back scratcher, just because Chase had bought one the first day. They kept saying, "You like it, you want it, bad boy", and everyone thought it was funny. Joe and me arrived on time to our hotel. Most people arrived late, and the teachers were angry. The bus took us back to the restaurant that we had been in the first day for lunch. We had a great dinner. We all got individual food. There was a soup first and then some kind of steak, which tasted like Japanese. We got desert, which was with yoghurt, probably from yaks, and with watermelon. Everyone thought it was ice cream.

After dinner we spent two hours in an Internet cafe. We were in the VIP section. We had some really comfortable chairs to sit in. We worked on writing our journals on the computers. First I didn't really know what we were supposed to do. At 9:30 we went back to our hotel. I wrote my journal and couldn't believe we only had one more day in Lijiang. I finished packaging my suitcase, so it was ready to be checked out the next day. I was really tired and fell asleep quickly.

I woke up at 6:30, because my stomach hurt. I felt like throwing up, but didn't, just had the feeling of it. I then fell asleep for 10 minutes, and the wake up call called at 7. I felt like I didn't get enough sleep. I had breakfast and checked out my luggage. I couldn't really eat anything for breakfast. We left the hotel and walked to the bus. The bus took us to a place where we started our bicycle ride. Most of the bicycles were the same, so i chose one quickly. It was silver, blue, and some yellow. My stomach stopped hurting. The bicycle ride felt short, but was an hour. I wanted to cycle faster but we had to cycle at a slower speed. We didn't use helmets. No one really fell of his or her bicycle. We cycled from the Old Town to a small village outside Lijiang City. I wanted to take more photos on the bicycle ride but couldn't.
 * Day 5, Friday March 27th:**

Our guide showed us around in the small village. The village was called Baisha village. It meant something with white. We did some shopping on the way to the restaurant. We saw some weird souvenirs on the way. We had dinner at Baishai Times Restaurant. There was a rooster screaming all the time but we couldn't find it. There was good bacon for lunch. My brother and his friends had a small fire that they played with. Jeffrey had bought a cool little clock. I also wanted one, so he helped me to bargain one. I got a bigger clock than his for the same price. We went back to our bus.

The bus took us to Lijiang Airport. I slept a little on the way. We took the flight to Kunming. We had to wait for about 4 hours in the airport. We got free time in the airport. Almost everyone went to KFC, including myself. I had to wait so long for my chicken nuggets. Chloe and my brother stole mine, although I showed my brother my wait list for it. Me, Daniel, Joe, and Jeffrey checked out the Internet cafe in the airport. The Internet connection was bad, so we went back to our lounge. Before we went to check our luggage and go through security we had some awards given from Ms. Perks and Nina. We got so called "suckers" candies for awards. I got the award for taking the most photos. Our flight departure was at around 8 o’ clock from Kunming. The flight from Kunming to Hongqiao airport was about 3 hours. This trip felt shorter than getting to Kunming from Shanghai.

It was wet when we arrived in Hongqiao airport. We picked up our luggage and took our school bus to Century Park Campus. We arrived at our school at about 12 o’ clock at night. Me, my brother, and Daniel took a taxi back home. It felt like we were going to the trip, but we were going home.

I had taken about 900 photos on this trip. The trip felt really short, although it lasted for 5 days. It was an unforgettable trip. I got to do a lot of new things, like going up 4680 meters above sea level, and trekking for so many hours on such a dangerous path.

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