“Daddy, I don’t want to go to Jimingyi”. Why not, I asked my two year old over my shoulder, while dodging trucks on the backroads of Hebei Province in June 2017. “Because it’s not good to go in there. It’s very dangerous”.
Tag: hebei province
I didn’t get a minute of sleep, not one. Even with the bare minimum of stuff I still had a huge load to carry – including a three year old and all our water – and there wasn’t room for a sleeping mat. So it was a long, hard night on the bare ground underneath a tarp flapping in very strong winds.
Once the kid was down, I lay there listening to the cacophony, counting down the moments until it rained, and waiting for dawn to break. She slept like a log under the faintly ridiculous shelter I built from a tarp, two tent pegs and her baby carrier. Not bad for her first ever bivvy.
Click through for a video and stills of our first Daddy-Daughter Bivvy.
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Home to pandas and spicy foods, Chengdu is, oh, right, you mean Chengde?
Yes. Chengde. Four hours up the freeway from Beijing, not four hours by plane. Chengde doesn’t, and probably never did, have pandas. But as the Qing Dynasty’s summer resort it has beautiful gardens, an impressive replica of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, laid back people and a great vegetarian restaurant. Sounds like a perfect weekend destination.
