Day 4 – Black Dragon Pools – Tuesday

A bit of a lie in allowed this morning – although I was up early anyway.

What a varied and fantastic day we had. Not far from the lodge is the Dragon Pools National Park. A popular destination for tourists and Chinese, it’s a beautiful and well taken care of park with a gorge and lots of rocks and waterfalls. You follow a long path with many stairs and it eventually leads you up the gorge to a beautiful scenic spot with a temple.

I thought that was going to be largely it for this ‘fairly easy’ day but no. Beyond the temple, through a gate where tourists are not allowed is where it gets interesting. We scrambled up the rest of the hill and got to the very top and then made our way around a winding road to the other side, where we stopped for lunch.

We then saw a Great Wall watchtower up a steep incline, so we scrambled up that and made our way to the top of the watchtower and saw some truly spectacular views of the entire valley. I really didn’t know much about China, and beautiful isn’t an adjective that would have sprung to mind before coming here, but it is now. The sun was out, everyone was in a great mood and we had this spectacular view of the Wall and the valley and the river and gorge and it was a great moment.

Getting back down to the start point if our journey took a while and was a little touch and go. The descent was very steep and overgrown and with some of the less steady trekkers in front, we had to take a steady pace. To be fair, there was a high risk of slipping and tumbling off the wall and into some thick brush.

After some real adventure and a bit of drama, we got to the bottom and found our coach and driver (Mr. Joe). We did our stretches and got on the bus and made our way home.

Dinner was fantastic once again, BBQ skewers of meat, rice, noodles, chicken, veggies, salad, and chips! They don’t do desert in China. 🙁

Early to bed as tomorrow is our longest day.

Internet here is slow and not easy to find so my photo gallery isn’t uploading. I’ll put a couple of pictures below instead.

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