Holiday in the trees

We went on a short vacation to the mountains this past weekend while Tim was off on National Day and Moon Festival Holiday. We found this Chinese mountain vacation resort on a local things-to-do website and booked a room in one of the houses up on stilts, among the tree tops.

When I say it is a Chinese resort, I mean that it caters to Chinese tourists and not foreigners. There are so many Chinese tourists visiting every place in China that, as far as we can tell, the foreign tourist population makes up a small percentage of tourism. That's just our perception so far, don't quote me on that.

So, for this mountain vacation resort this means 1) it is not easy to get there without a private car and fluent Chinese, 2) there are no English-speaking staff, and 3) the beds are really hard.

So, we hired our friendly driver to take us there and pick us up two days later. This plan worked for the most part, once he helped us figure out the required tickets and check points to get into the large tourist mountain area. Always remain flexible. It was only about 2 hours from our house.

And we did fine with the language and ordering food and communicating with the reception desk. The first night at the restaurant I was whisked back into the kitchen to point at the food we wanted, from the fresh ingredients, since we couldn't read the menu. Most of the time we were communicating with the trees and bugs and lizards and critters that we found.

Petting a giant millipede

Building a fairy house

Hiking in the woods

And we drank wine on the porch after Milan went to bed to try to lessen the effects of the wood slab, but mostly just suffered and actually appreciate our hard-ish mattress at home now that we are back. Milan slept on his mattress pad on the floor that we brought from home and did great. He even asked today, two days later, if we were going home to the tree house.

Our tree house home

Many more pictures up on Flickr.