Summer Travels

Summer is here! Which means that I will be traveling around China for the next 20 days...woohoo! I left Nanjing on June 27th for a crazy few days in Shanghai with Ryan and Zach. Those two departed from Pudong airport to go back to the States, while I met Molly, Geoff, and Jacob at the train station. The trip started off a little rocky. We had all the planes made, but being the procrastinators that we are, we did not have any train tickets. This led to us not being able to take the train we originally planned to take. We spent most of Thursday researching different trains we could take and trying to rearrange our trip, so we could still hit up all the places we wanted to see. The original plan: Zhangjiajie (inspiration for Avatar mountains), Nanning (visiting a friend), Guilin, Chengdu (hold a panda), Chongqing, cruise up the Yangtze river seeing the three-gorges damn, get off in Yicheng, Wuhan, and finally back to Nanjing on the 20th of July. Well, we found a train to Wuhan. So, there starts our trip. Arriving in Wuhan, we found out that we could get a train to Zhangjiajie leaving at 3:40am. The train ride was 9 hours long on hard seats. Oh my! Hard seats for long periods of time are trying. However, the ride was pretty good. The car emptied out, and we were able to sleep! That's all I ask for. Basically, the first leg of our trip was standing in line and riding on trains. However, we made it to Zhangjiajie to our great hostel safe and sound. Tomorrow, we will hike up the mountains and stay in a hostel on the mountain. Then Sunday, we will head to Nanning. We do have train tickets there...we'll see how accurate the end result of this trip is to our original plans. But that's the fun in it :) Pictures to come... Here's to traveling!