Shui Mo (hike with Maria and Nathaniel)

When my Alaskan friends were here, we decided on the Saturday to go out to a small town to see some rural China. Maria (roommate) and Reed (friend) came too. We went to a bus station and picked a town at random, pretty much: Shui Mo, a village about two hours northwest. The ticket woman couldn't figure out why we would want to go there, but obliged. Once we got there we strolled the small streets and walked by some small farms, before Forrest and Reed took an early bus back to the city, leaving Nathaniel, Maria and I to walk out of town and follow a path up into the hills. As we hit forks, we kept on choosing the smaller trail, until eventually we left the path altogether and followed a stream up into the bush, stopping finally at a little fall where the brush got too thick and the valley walls too steep for us to carry on. When we came down from the hills, school had let out, and all the village kids came to see what was up. After I got the rowdy boys to chase me through the streets while N and M hung back with the rest, there are a couple of pictures of me trying to play a little capoeira with them. With the child-mob over it was getting dark and there was no bus coming through that day (we hadn't thought the return trip through...) so we set out hitch-hiking on the highway. It only took us 3 rides to get back to our front door in Chengdu that night! 1 free, and two others nice and cheap.
The pictures are very me-heavy because Nathaniel and Maria took them all. And yes, that's a Ho Chi Minh shirt I picked up in Vietnam.