Orangutans, Gibbons, Probiscis OH MY!

Back in March of 2013 we visited the Kalimantan region of Borneo, Indonesia. Here is a look at how we spent our time and of our explorations.

A snap shot of our adventure!

China Part 1

In July we traveled to China for 9 days, we spent time in Xi’an and Beijing, we explored and discovered many new things along the way.  Though this blog is a bit late I wanted to share this trip with you.  Here is part 1 of  our trip to China.

Our journey began with a very late arrival in Xi’an where we were greeted by our guide (Jerry) and driver, and I kid you not I thought our guide had been dropped in China from the US, he had very little accent and a great command of the english language, funny though he has never left China!

The next morning we awoke bright and early with much anticipation to start our quest for the Terra Cotta Warriors.  We arrived and we were given the royal treatment, instead of waiting in line for 45 minutes for the shuttle to bring us to the site of the Warriors, our guide used his connections and our fair skin (seriously our fair skin throughout China was a tourist attraction, I have never had my picture taken so many times and we thought Nicholas’ face was going to crack from smiling so much, he was the real rock star) to get us on a shuttle much quicker and we arrived at the dig in about 10 minutes time.

I really couldn’t believe that I was finally getting the opportunity to visit this amazing site and experience the Warriors up close.  It really is breath-taking, it is so hard to fathom that these Warriors are 2200 years old.  The sheer enormity and quantity of the warriors is truly boggling.  Especially when you consider that each one is different from the next and that there are still many more to be discovered.

After our visit to the Terra Cotta Warriors, we headed back to Xi’an city center where we had a visit at the National Art and Calligraphy Museum.  We got a brief history on the calligraphy we went into the art room where we were given instruction on making basic characters and actually got to use the old very large brushes.

Then it was on to the Old Wall of Xi’an, where we were more of the tourist attraction than the actual wall!  Nicholas was the real star with his fair skin and light hair, but I was even mistaken for a Hollywood Star (don’t ask me which one, I couldn’t understand him).  They even thought Kurt was George Clooney.

Dinner that evening was in the Old Muslim Quarter, the sights, sounds, and smells were tantalizing, we toured the old Mosque and had a traditional dinner in a very local restaurant that was upstairs.  Our meals in Xi’an were some of the best that we had anywhere in China. Our time in the muslim quarter was well spent according to Nicholas and Lauren since this is where they both acquired some new items, Nicholas a cross-bow and Lauren a knock off wallet (Lauren became quite the expert at negotiating prices for the items that she wanted).  Even through we were dodging rain drops and getting very wet we managed to have a great time.

Let me describe something about Xi’an, I don’t think we ever saw a blue sky the entire time we were there, in fact, the sky was always this brownish hazy color from all the pollution, and I am not joking when I say it really was hard to breath, you could just feel with each breath just how polluted the air was.  On our last day Jerry, asked if the sky we saw that day was blue, and to be honest you could see just a slight hint of blue, but nothing like the blue skies that we are used to.  He actually teared up when I told him of the blue skies that we have in the US, he felt bad that his daughter has never seen a sky that blue.

The next morning we headed to the Wild Goose Pagoda and the National History Museum.  Again, Nicholas’ face must be adorning many walls throughout China since he was getting photos taken at every step along the way.  The temple was very interesting and I was even given instruction on how to light the incense, bow and present the incense to the Buddha, it was really quite surreal.  The gardens of the Pagoda were just beautiful and we spent some time at the wish wall where we each wrote down our wish and left it hanging on the wall with all the 1,000’s of others that had been placed there before.  From there we had a quick stop at the National History Museum where we were educated on some of the ancient history of China which is always fascinating and of course prompted many questions and discussions from the kids.

We bid farewell to our guide (Jerry) and driver and boarded our flight back to Beijing where we would start the second part of our adventure.  But each of us experienced something wonderful in Xi’an.

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