Well, I'm sorry to say that I didn't do much posting on vacation. I'm back in China now, of course, but I do have an excuse this time. I had planned to post on the go while on vacation, but discovered that the Blogger app for android was no longer supported and, in fact, had not been supported for many years. Why they still allow downloads of this app, which essentially doesn't work, is beyond me. Anyway, I didn't have the right adapters to use my computer, even though I carried it with me everywhere I went, and eventually just abandoned the idea altogether.

What I did do was post some videos to youtube while I was travelling around the Phillipines. while these were not of sufficient quality to post publicly, it did spark an interest in doing some better video work, editing a bit, and posting those publicly on youtube. I think that will work out nicely, though there is definitely a limit to how professional those will look, but I do think they could be good enough to show some interesting things around China. Seeing those as a goal may also inspire me to do more of the travelling I wanted to do when first coming here anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of travelling in the past four years. But most of the traveling I've done has fallen into one of two categories: trips to Guangdong Province; and trips to Southeast Asia. I've done countless trips to Guangdong. After all, for the first three years I had a visa that required me to make trips out of the country every two months. Hong Kong counts as being out of the country for these purposes, so I made many trips to Hong Kong, but we were only a couple of hours away from the border in Chenzhou, and only about an hour away from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. So it was a convenient place to spend a weekend and a really cool city. I would have no problems going back there. But there are several other places I've spent time in the area, including Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Macau. 

I've spent every Spring Festival but one in SE Asia, often seeing more than one country in a trip (we usually get around three weeks for spring festival). I've been to Vietnam, Cambodia and the Phillipines once each, and Thailand twice. I was devestated that I wasn't getting to go back to Thailand this year. I really love Bangkok.

Though that may seem like a lot there's a glaring hole in my travel experiences: China. Well, most of it. I mean, the area that I've seen in Guangdong is limited. The list of cities may seem impressive until you realize that they're all part of the same urban area called the Pearl River Delta. It's like someone in Atlanta driving down to South Florida several times and pretending they did a lot of travelling because they stayed in Miami Beach on one trip and then Fort Lauderdale on another. They're all right next to each other!

So I want to expand my experiences in travelling around China. Yes, I'm sure I'll return to the PRD sometime. I love that part of China (I'd like to move there if it wasn't so expensive). But I still haven't make a trip north to see Beijing. I did go about ten years ago, before I moved to China, on vacation from the US. But I haven't been back since I moved here. More importantly, I haven't seen any of the famous cities or national parks of China that an international tourist would likely miss. That's one of things that I came here for! I wanted to be able to take the time to travel around to places that most foreigners would miss because, well, if you come to China, you'll only have two weeks or so and the number of places you can reasonably get to is limited. You'd want to See Beijing and the Great Wall; make sure to pay a visit to the ancient capital of Xi'an and see the terra cotta soldiers; Guilin is a must, of course; and finish off your vacation in Shanghai. But those places are all on the postcards. That's why you want to see them, but then you're missing all the great stuff that doesn't normally attract tourists. 

This is the same dilimma that is faced by every traveller. No one wants to go to Paris and miss the Eiffel Tower. But every minute you spend at the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre is a minute you don't get to relax in a cafe or explore some city street. By moving to China, I was  hoping to simply increase the amount of time I was able to spend in a place, thereby giving myself the ability to see both the Giant Buddha statue (there always is one) and find the alleyway hotpot that will be so delicious and give the runs for a week.

But I haven't done any of that! Instead, I've been caught up in the drudgeries of day-to-day life. I haven't done that much adventure travel. The biggest trips I've taken have been outside of China (I'm addicted to everything in SE Asia), and most of my travels inside of China have been rather mundane. Until last fall, that is. The time I spent last year back in the states has re-invigorated my desire to travel in China. I hope you 've seen some of the pictures from my explorations of Hunan Province, where I live.

Last fall, after returning from the states, I finally took a trip I could be proud of. The places I saw were still tourist sights, to be sure, but there were a bit out of the way. One was a beautiful mountain town along a river called Fenghuang (A legendary bird that was the mate of the Chinese Dragon, sometimes translated as 'Phoenix', though with none of the connotations of western legend). The other was  a national park called Jiang Jia Jie. That's a beautiful mountain area where erosion has carved spectacular natural scenery. Both of those are super famous Hunan sites. 

So that's my new goal: travel more and film it.