Matt's Travel Adventures

Wow, now we are deep in central China. When we arrived at Jiujiang I discovered what it really was like to be different. Pretty much every person on the street stared at us and me. We got a taxi from the train station into town and found a cheap hotel from the Lonely planet book.

At the counter, no one could speak english so it came down to Liam's chinese skills and somehow we got our room. The rooms weren't flash but still really cheap, probably cheaper than most hostels in Shanghai or Beijing will be. We got our own TV and bathroom and three beds, which were still as hard as a rock.

Later that afternoon we headed to Lushan, a nearby mountain that had a bit of a park and a few old temples and the like. The bus was very cheap but the price paid for the insanity of the driver. We were driving up this windy hill in a minibus, overtaking other buses on blind corners into oncoming buses. It was still amazing how crazy the drivers here were.

But we finally made it safe to the top of the mountain. Until we found it was going to be 135 yuan just to enter the park ($22 AUD)! So we paid the fee and discovered that you still had to get to any of the attractions, the only way, by taxi! So we walked for a bit then got a taxi to something that sounded good, Dragons Head Rock.

When we got there, we couldn't find the rock but we did find some other buildings and some amazing views, the mountain was surrounded in cloud but was still great and covered in a range of different trees.

When we finally got to the end of the trail after many stops at various temples and lookouts we were rewarded with an beautiful view of the valley. We could actually watch the cloud moving over the mountain.

So the day ended with us trying to find a way to get back to Jiujiang. We go to the visitors centre to find the last bus left at 6pm, it was about 6.10pm. But inside the visitors centre we somehow ran into the tourism manager who helped us out by saying that some taxis should take us back to Jiujiang for about 12 yuan each. He gave us his card to show the driver in case they tried to rip us off.

We went in search of a taxi, found a few but some didn't want to go back to Jiujiang because they were Lushan taxis. But we finally found one who would do it, for 60 yuan (not a bad deal, considering the trip took about 1 hour).

So we couldn't use our card on anyone but we did get to see Lushan.

The next stop, Jingdezhen