It was an early morning on Saturday (June 18th), but we wanted to get to the gorge as early as possible because it opened at 7:30 and closed around 4:00. We met up with Oliver, our language instructor/student at Peking University because he also wanted to come with us, which ended up being a good thing. It was almost impossible to figure out where the buses left from and we're 99.9% sure we would not have found it if Oliver wasn't with us. We found the bus terminal about 20 minutes before the last bus left for the morning at 8:30 and it was an uneventful ride until about 10:30. We got stopped at an intersection and it took us a while to figure out why the road was blocked off: there was a cycling competition going on so we had to wait about 45 minutes in the bus before we could cross the intersection! The worst part of sitting in the bus for 45 minutes was that we had just planned to buy lunch at the gorge, so we had not bothered to bring anything besides water bottles. However, everyone else in the bus seemed to have brought MASSIVE amounts of food! There was one guy that had brought ham, huge sausages, bread, etc. for his entire group. We were joking around that if they had a turkey, it would have been just like Thanksgiving Dinner!
After the cycling competition finally ended, we were able to cross the street, only to find out that we were literally a minute!!! away from the place! So we were stuck (while hungry) across the street from Longqing Gorge for about 45 minutes!
Once we finally got out of the bus, we had a nice 15 minute or so walk to the entrance of Longqing Gorge/the place where we had to buy our entrance tickets. Once we got into the area, we had to take this huge escalator to the where the Gorge was which was shaped like a giant dragon, which was very cool.
Once we got to the top (over the dam), we took this nice boat ride around the gorge, which was very beautiful! There were many tall, skinny mountains, just like the kind you see in old Chinese movies and like the ones in Mulan.
There were also a lot of other things to do in the Gorge, including a lot of trails to walk around and there was a zip-line over the gorge, which we all decided to go. The view from the zip-line was very cool but we all commented that it was probably the slowest zip-line in the world; the ride on the speed-boat across the river in the gorge was more thrilling!
We also decided to rent some canoes for a little while and paddle around the gorge. Apparently, however, Chinese don't know what canoes are and they ended up being more like paddle-boats, which are a lot slower. It also didn't help that they only had two pieces of wood nailed together for a paddle, which made it difficult to paddle the boat.
The canoes were still a lot of fun though because people kept running into our boats. We're not sure if it was on purpose or not, but it was hard to steer the boats and it ended up turning into bumper-boats! Though I'm sure some of the people were purposely running into us because two guys did and then exclaimed in broken English, "You very beautiful girl!"
After walking around a little more, we headed back to the entrance because the place was closing and we needed to catch our bus back. It was definitely a fun way to spend the day and we were all exhausted after we got back, but it was nice to get out of the big city of Beijing for a while.
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