Back to Lijiang
Back to Lijiang
I will be spending this week in a remote corner of Yunnan province in south-west China with a group of 18 students from my school (Li Po Chun United World College). Each year, all our 1st Year students spend a week in China doing service work or personal challenge activities. Groups will be going to diverse locations off the tourist trail in Fujian, Guizhou, Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan provinces.
My group will be flying from Shenzhen to Kunming, from where we will take an overnight bus to the beautiful town of Lijiang. (You can see some of my images of Lijiang HERE and HERE). From Lijiang we will take a local bus to the small town of Qiaotou, which will be our base as we spend two days doing house painting for a community of lepers in a remote village alpine village called Ma Chan. This is the same place where I took a group of students last year to build the first toilets in the village, pictures of which can be seen HERE, HERE and HERE.
After our work in Ma Chan, we will embark on a two-day 24 kilometre trek through the spectacular scenery of Tiger Leaping Gorge (pictures of which can be seen HERE and HERE). I am really looking forward to seeing the night sky once again in the Gorge, which is a spectacular display of tens of thousands of bright stars, interspersed inevitably by several shooting stars. I don’t get to see many stars in Hong Kong, and last year some of my 17 year old students from Hong Kong commented that on their trek in the Gorge that day, they had seen snow and stars for the first time in their lives!
I hope to have some interesting stories to tell in next week’s blog, which may be a little later than usual as we will only return to the College on Sunday evening from our week away in the eastern Himalayas.
Sunday, 5 November 2006