Sailing In Xiamen

Well, isn't that the way it always works.

The month before I leave Xiamen I find a new western grocery store (with tons of yummy things like whole wheat bread, baking powder, and New Castle Brown Ale!), a rent-able practice room full of instruments for cheap, and a new marina with rent-able sail boats!

Sigh. This would have changed the way I live here! (In good and bad ways I think...)

Oh yeah, PS everyone. This is my last week in Xiamen! Can't believe its been a year! I guess I should do a blog on that later.

At least I made the best out of all of the new fun stuff in the last month of being here. I had a great day of sailing with a french friend of mine the other day. The sun was out, the pollution was at a minimum, and the wind was kicking!



The marina is located on the northern tip of the Island boarding the mainland. There really isn't a whole lot more there. It's actually one of the least developed areas I know of in Xiamen. It does however have a big bridge and a pretty spiffy looking Posiden looking statue that make the Marina look pretty neat.



I'm not sure exactly what kind of boat it was we rented. If any of you sailing people can figure it out form pictures/description let me know. It easily seated 6 and was probably 24 feet long. Should have checked it out more carefully... maybe I'll go one more time and check it out.

It was quite a challenge to scrape off a years worth of rust while only having two people in a tank of a boat, in really heavy wind, and being the only one of the two who knew how to sail.... but it was actually super fun. It pressed my abilities to a comfortable limit and we really got going at some points!

I risked taking my new Camera out on the boat, but it was worth it because Ashleen (my French friend) also got some great action shots out on the boat. Unfortunately I left it on a really low quality setting, so most of them only look half way decent with a fair amount of editing.

Here are a few:





Then I took over the camera while I let Ashleen give sailing a shot.



Unfortunately I will never see the funniest pictures of the day but I can at least tell the story.

On our way in, we noticed a MASSIVE yacht (Wow there is some crazy money in China. Holy income distribution discrepancy Batman!) with 5 or 6 young Chinese women in bikinis being photographed by some very professional looking photographers. We sailed in for a closer look and from the logos on the boat/cameras it was obviously some kind of magazine.

As soon as we got close enough to see, one of the girls jumped up and started smiling and waving at us. This of course got the attention of the photographers who then spun around to look at what she was so excited about.

Before we knew it the boat erupted in flash. My ridiculous pose instincts is now instinctively activated by Chinese camera flash. We struck some silly over the top James Bond-ish poses for them and sailed on.

Whats more exciting than 6 bikini clad 20 somethings on a yacht? In China, apparently its two Vanilla faces on a dinky sail boat.

I really hope I end up in some kind of yachting magazine striking a killer action pose! (To any of my Chinese friends, be on the look out in 中国游艇网 !)

Anyway, the marina was gorgeous. I hope to get out again before I leave since it will be cold back in RI! There were also some little colorful boats that we were hoping to see in the water, but never went in. To bad.

Here they are on land.



Well, that's it for sailing. I guess I'll be doing an entry about leaving here pretty soon.

Stay good.

Khumjung: First Look at the Top of the World

I realized that I posted the whole lead up to Everest and then never posted it! Whoops!

Well here it is.

I started the day early on a loop hike to Khumjung. The first part of the climb was straight up the mt. from Namche.

Here is a nice view of the village on a clear morning.


Early in the day I met a nice Italian women (who I though was just a little older then me and ended up being about 40...) and we did most of the hike together. Turns out she has lived in China for 11 years and wants the next place she lives to be Afghanistan. She says China has lost its thrill and she needs something new.

Surprisingly after year, I am starting to understand.

We chatted until the guide told us that we had arrived at the first viewing place of Everest, and sure enough, there it was! Looming up another 17,000 feet after I had already gone up 12,000 in 4 days!



Everest is actually the one directly over my head, even though it doesn't look like the tallest of the 4 from this angle.

We hiked on until a Ukrainian guy stopped us and clued us in on a really good viewing spot right off the path. And what a view it was! No one else was there and nothing was in the way! Thank random Ukrainian guy!



After a few 100 photos and a good half an hour of just sitting there in bewilderment of how fantastic it really looks and babbling about how lucky we were to have such good weather and all kinds of other nonsense, we moved on to the famous "Everest View Hotel"

The Everest View Hotel holds the world record for being the highest operational hotel in the world at 13,500 ft above sea level. It was built by the Japanese with a heli-pad right out side to bring tourist directly up from Kathmandu. Of course almost no one can acclimatize to 5000 ft of elevation gain in one day, so it almost never gets used!

The view however is great! We did find out AFTER being lead in, that you were expected to order something from the menu if you wanted to check out the view (which was annoying since the view was hardly better than the last place we had just sat and enjoyed for free and with out others chatting all around us...). So we got a pot of tea (the only thing that didn't cost mortgaging your first born child) and relaxed for a bit.

This picture is of the reflection of the Mts. off the big mirrored windows that allow guests to see Everest from their rooms (but don't allow guests to see into the rooms).



After an hour or so we moved on to Khumjung, a valley village craddled between some "Smaller" peaks. We ate lunch here and went to see the Sir. Edmund Hillary School and Hospital which have transformed the once desperately poor village into an oasis for the Sherpa people.

This is a monument to him.


This lovely guy watched over us while we ate lunch.


The lunch placealso had nice flowers in the garden.


And they fueled the fire that cooked our lunch with this...


Which are of course made by these guys...




After lunch we also check out the "Yeti Skull" at the local monastery. Legend of the locals is that it used to run around eating Yaks and small children until it was killed and given to the people of the village as a gift from another village. The village took it as an insult and kicked it all the way home. It didn't have any real significance until tourist started showing up and wanted to check it out.

A small donation was enough for them to open the box so that we could see it, but no picture were allowed of the skull it self. The inside of the monastery was quite colorfully decorated though. Here is a shot of all the different prayer books.



On our way back to Namche the fog started to roll in. I was REALLY glad that my guide recommended we do the hike backwards from the way most people normally do it! We would have been arriving at Everest just as the clouds were covering it up!

We spent the rest of the day at the local market who's merchants roll in from miles around every Friday night and Saturday. Our guide said some people hike in as much as 9 days from Tibet just to trade here.

We did also go straight to the bakery in Namche for apple pie since French guy along the trail told us he had had the best pie of his life in Khumjung, but failed to tell us where! But the craving stuck and so we satisfied it with some pretty delicious apple turnovers when we got back!

The next day was just a hike down in a foggy day so I didn't take many pictures. Then of course there was the 3 1/2 days stuck in Lukla. But thats a post for another day.