Trip to Yongling

The last days of April the Foreign Expert Bureau organised a trip to Yongling county for us. We left home early on Thursday morning and went first to the Liujiaxia Reservoir, one of the largest in North-West China. After a great lunch with plenty of fish by the Lianhua Tai Ferry Terminal, we took a boat to the monastery of Bingling Si. This old monastery is being restored. Old buddha statues could be seen. The boatride was also one of the highlights, as the landscape was awsome. In the evening there was a concert with traditional Tibetan and Hui music and dances. On the second day, we went to a museum dedicated to dinausor footprints fossils reached after another one-hour boat journey. The museum was high up in the mountains and the trek was more interesting to me than the museum itself, maybe because it is only starting to become a tourist attraction. The afternoon we went fishing by a pond and enjoyed local sanpaotai tea, a kind of tea perfumed with longan and dates. In the evening we had a great dinner in the city, with plenty of lamb in all its variations. The participants came from the USA, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, France, Mexico, The Philippines, Russia and Kyrgyzstan.