Day One: Key words
• Mountain, River and Bamboo
• Food and Hotel
• Thunderstorm
I felt relaxed when I entered the place called Shan Gougou (Shan in Chinese means mountain and Gougou means gully), as if a child being hugged by her mother. The colour of the sky was yellow and grey had become green. The mountains which were filled with bamboo were green; the trees beside the road were green, even the air I inhaled and exhaled was also ''green'' which is fresh and comfortable. Shan Gougou or Hangzhou gully is located almost forty kilometres north west of downtown Hangzhou. Forest coverage has reached 95%, which improves the quality of air in the area and the temperature of Shan Gouou is much lower than in other places. Many travellers said that the village here is the closest to paradise in its beauty.
We visited two villages in the first day, Mao Tang (茅塘) and Tang Keng（汤坑）. “茅”in Chinese refers to a type of grass, which is called Mao Chao（茅草). It is said that the grass of Mao is very frequently seen in this village and the local people would use this grass to make paper. As we know, to make paper also requires a lot of water, so in this village there are many ponds for making paper. 塘 (Tang) in Chinese refers to a pond. So the meaning of the village’s name is a place that has a lot of ponds for using grass to make paper. However, we did not see many ponds in this village during the trip. Instead, we found that there is much Bamboo in this village; you could see bamboo almost everywhere on the mountain. Industrious people use this bamboo to make boats, armrests and bridges and roads.
 The village still preserves many traditional styles of buildings and also the way of doing business. There is rice wine shop which is in a wooden house and all the wine from this shop is homemade. We also tasted the traditional handmade rice cake. Many of our GLV staff even tried to make rice cake on their own, using the mill to smash the rice and steam the rice…
Then we visited another village called Tang Keng （汤坑）. According to our guide, as there are many people whose surname is Tang and in the local dialect Keng means village, so the meaning of Tang Keng is actually a village where many people with the surname Tang live. The main itinerary for Tang Keng involved climbing mountains. In fact, I felt that the mountain were not very high but had many springs and waterfalls on the way. On some of the roads, we had to cross the river. Inevitably, some of our visitors' shoes got wet, including mine. So I took off my shoes and walked barefoot. The road made of big stones felt comfortable to walk on and I also felt that walking barefoot is a good way to get close to nature. I noticed that the food prices in this village were not very expensive. The food delivered to the top of the mountain was almost same price as the food downtown and I also enjoyed the delicious food offered by the restaurant, with fresh vegetables, chicken and fish. We almost ate all of them, including several bowls of rice. At night, Liam, Kana, Vincent and Morris had a small beer party in their room. However, I felt very tired that night and fell asleep very quickly, the loud noises from the party and the thunderstorm outside the window did not disturb my dream.
Day 2
• Rafting, Water Fighting and Boating
• Wet
We had a simple breakfast in the morning and went to the rafting place very early. There were two types of rafts we could choose, rubber raft or bamboo raft. Most of us chose rubber rafts, except for Sam, Tony and two of the GLV staff. Generally speaking, rafting in Shuang Xi (Double Spring ) was not as exciting or challenging as we had expected. But we enjoyed water fighting on the way, especially the guys. It's a shame that we did not buy any equipment for water fighting, such as water guns or basins; therefore, we were always attacked by other rafts. Fortunately, the guys of GLV were very brave, for example Bob actively joined in the water fighting; he even jumped into the river. Cynthia and her brother were in the same raft; however they were not very good at using the pedals at the beginning so I could see their raft was always floundering around. I shared a raft with Abby, unfortunately we were often attacked by other rafts. So the water soon filled almost half of our boat and we had to jump into the water and drain the water from the boat.
It could be expected that almost all of us would be wet in the end, including Sam who took a Bamboo raft. There was a changing room in the tourist centre with hot water which is very convenient for us when we had a shower and changed clothes.
After lunch we returned to GLV.
Ying.zhang
章颖亮
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