Qianjiang homeland trip!

After our short night last night, we've all done pretty well today, with still more travelling.  We all managed about 6 hours sleep, were up at 8am, and on the road around 10, heading to Qianjiang, where Amelia was born.  Our guide for this part of the trip is Michael, who was also one of our guides in 2005 when we were here to get Amelia!  Very nice to have that familiarity.

The highway to Qianjiang is quite nice, a twinned highway, much like the 401, except that a large part of it goes UNDER the mountains.  Tunnel after tunnel, some of them going for probably 5 km or more.  When not in the tunnels, the scenery was fabulous.  I will attach a few pictures to this post, but the app I'm using will not let me insert them into the middle of the post so I think they will be at the bottom.

On the way we stopped at a nice scenery viewing spot, from which Michael took us on an off road adventure.  We climbed down some slick dirt paths to some local houses to get a closer look, at one of them we met the owner, a man named Mao, who happily gave us a tour of his home.  This was an unexpected but great treat.  He was very nice and at the end, he took Amelia's hand and helped her back up the dirt paths to get back to our van. 

We got to our hotel in Qianjiang shortly after 2pm, had a quick bite to eat then went to visit some of the important places in Amelia's past.  We are now back at the hotel and taking it easy before we plan to head to bed early.  This will be our first opportunity to make up some of the lost sleep.

Tomorrow we have the morning to walk around the area before heading back to Chongqing after lunch.  As we have Saturday morning free before flying to Nanchang, Michael has offered to take us on another tour of our choice, so we may get a chance to take Amelia to the zoo to see the Panda's.

A couple notes to everyone - I haven't been able to get the VPN to work properly here so we do not have access to the blog or facebook.  Comments posted by you guys on the blog are e-mailed to us, so we are reading them and appreciate getting them, but we do not have the ability to reply to them.  The Great (fire)Wall of China strikes again!

Also if someone could pass along to Florence that Janey plans to call her but we don't know when we will get a chance yet, it might be Saturday or Sunday until we get the time to get a calling card.

BTW - I've taken 192 pics so far.  :)

Sent from my ASUS Pad