Weekend at Mongenshan

Roger and I invited Lindsay's pre-school teacher to watch the girls for the weekend and we headed three hours west of Shanghai to Moganshan (Mogan Mountains).  We had a great time.  Unforuntaly, we didn't have the best weather, it was gray and drizzly out off and on.  However, it didn't bother us.  Compared to Shanghai, the air was clean and the views were beautiful!  The gray skys didn't do much for my mountain pictures though! 

Here is Roger on his "detox" walk when we first arrived!  Dosen't he look so peaciful!!!

Moganshan has two main staples for the local people...bamboo trees is one.  Few pines are to be seen in the forest...mostly populated with the bamboo trees.

Lots of ruin buildings during our hikes in the mountains.

This is supposidly one of many bunkers from WWII. 

Roger standing out front of our cabin.

The ayi's prepared diner each night for us.  This was the best Rosemerry Chicken with "candle light"!

Some strange type of auto that the locals were using to haul stuff. 

Since most of my pictures of the mountains did not turn out well due to the rain, I took lots of the bamboo forest and tea plantations.

Second for the locals is green tea...we ran across lots of plantations...

This was some type of temple in the middle of a mountain.  Very interesting experience...we met a very old man living at the temple by himself.

And Roger climbed thousands and thousands of steps during the weekend...

Stopping for our picnic lunch...

Another one of the cabins at the "Naked Retreat" that we stayed in further down the mountain.

Our second night dinner...again, the ayi's prepared it for us.  This one was some of the local Chinese food.  Very good...Roger's fav's were the 2 veggy's dishes...IMAGINE THAT!!!

Inside our studio cabin...I spent most of the time inside next to the wood burner stove.  It was not exactly warm!

Our trek back down the mountain to meet our driver.  Fortunally, we had some local porters (80 and 90 year old men) that hauled our luggage up and down the mountain for us.  It was only 389 steps up to our cabin.  Yeah...the "up" part was the bad part.  Thank goodness for the porters!  We felt slighly guilt that we were letting the men twice and almost 3x's our age haul our leggage...but we were told they LOVE the job!