Tuesday, 04 November 2008

Too many weekends away

To keep people happy, make sure they never have too little or too much of a good thing. I should have been a philosophiser.

Every weekend (being, remember, Monday and Tuesday for me) since the holidays, which ended a month ago, we have "done something". As a school, we've had an event, gone somewhere, partook/partaken/taken part in an activity, been on the razz. My birthday, halloween, beach trips, and other stuff that's fallen out of my memory.

Suffice to say, it's been a busy month. Taken individually, each activity has been fantastic fun, but when put all together... Well, some whining started to creep in last week, and so yesterday was our last school activity for a while. When you live, work, and play with the same people day in and day out, and have no escape route, things can get tough.

Yesterdays' activity saw us walking up Loufu mountain. Those that have been reading this for a while might remember that I cycled there last year, and that it's a sacred mountain and beautiful and whatnot. However, when we arrived there yesterday, it was... almost closed. Gone are all the little shops and restaurants. Gone are the eighteen million people crowding around making a noise. Gone is the gong. But they've replaced it all with rain, so that's ok.

Fortunately, the mountain remains, and we walked a part of the way up it, looking for the elusive "Butterfly Cave". On reaching a temple at the base of the mountain, the group from the school elected to go left, and I, being of a contrary nature and remembering that there's a sign to the cave elsewhere, went right. With Lisa and Tom.

I take this moment to put in a little aside. If, after living in a place for 14 months, and speaking about it regularly, you still don't realise that signposting is a joke and a trap, then frankly you're an idiot and you deserve everything that's coming to you. I am that idiot.

So, we followed the multiple signs to "Butterfly cave", and after about 15 minutes arrived at a small cave entrance with a big blue steel door covering it. No entry, piss off. It was at exactly this moment that I got a call from one of the guys in the other group, asking where we were, because they were "standing outside a cave, with butterflies carved into the rocks, and isn't this what you're looking for?". Bugger.

Anyway, another 15 minutes of walking and scrambling and whatnot up an ever deteriorating path in the rain, we crested a rise and landed smack on the road that the others were walking along, but some distance above them. We walked down, met them, listened carefully to their directions to the butterfly cave, followed them, and.... HAHAHA. Sigh. Bloody hell.

What we did find though was a really strange set of tunnels, which for 5Y we got to walk through. They are carved right deep into the mountain, and have fittings for what I would imagine were at one stage very solid doors sealing each end. Seriously, these things were built for what, to my uneducated mind, look like some desparate defence. I can't find any info about them though, so I guess that for now, they're just tunnels.

Anyway, after all this, we finally met up with the group, then headed off for some lunch at a restaurant where they forced all of the westerners to sit together, and faced massive problems when I sat down at a "chinese" table. Apparently the food was different at the tables, but having eaten at both the Western and Chinese tables, I'm hard pressed not to think there were other reasons.

A quick game of post-lunch touch rugby, a good bus-sleep home, and our last school event for a while came to a pleasant end.

It was, if I may be so brash, a bloody good day.

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