Merrell/Chong Family travels: Saved by the "mayor" of Miaoqian Village.

Today was one of the days that reconfirms your faith in people and also reconfirms that travel is a good experience. We travelled to an area in China called Moganshan. You can see our exact location at 30.592795, 119.844341. It is a mountainous area covered in bamboo. Huge bamboo forests. Supposedly the bamboo forest scenes in Crouching Tiger were filmed here. Original plan was to spend a few days hiking in the bamboo forests. Unfortunately they have had a really unprecedented amount of snow here. A lot of the bamboo is bent all the way to the ground. We were able to get a cab ride up here but there was still lots of snow on the roads and lots of bamboo down on the roads. Then things got even more unfortunate. Turns out many of the guest houses up here close in the winter. I guess I didn’t know that when booking our rooms back in August with Agoda.com. No one from Unique Resort Moganshan or Agoda every contacted me to say that the resort would be closed during the time I booked. So the cab drivers dropped us off and we started walking up the steps to our guest house. Only to meet some lady coming down the steps who told us it was closed. She then made a phone call and some guy showed up. He took a look at our reservations and started making a bunch of phone calls. Eventually he led us to a nearby hotel. This one is called Map of Mogan Life. You can find it online on Agoda. Its stunningly beautiful. It was clearly shut down too but the hotel staff was there essentially working on cleaning and reorganizing the place in preparation for the spring season. They let us sit in the grand main room. Its a three story vaulted space with book shelves full of books and giant works of calligraphy running up the three story walls. I'll try to go back tomorrow and take some pictures. They offered us tea and sunflower seeds and longans. They asked if we wanted lunch and said it would be $18 per person. Seemed high for China but since we had no where else to go we said yes. Clearly the chef was in the house because we had 6 really fancy courses like a banquet; chicken soup, beef with wintermelon stew, crispy fried shrimp with peanuts, steamed fish, and two vegetable dishes with vegetables they apparently harvested from their garden under the snow. Totally worth every penny. During this time there were apparently all kinds of phone calls being made on our behalf. After lunch the original guy came back. We don’t know who he is but we decided to say he was the mayor of this little village. He told us he had found us a place to stay. He led us up the hill to another guest house. This one is called Cloud Mirror and is also very beautiful. It looks like in the summer it would be awesome with mountain bikes and picnic areas and a pool. They checked us in and told us we didn’t have to pay for rooms but we would have to pay for meals. Apparently the “mayor” made a bunch of phone calls and it sounds like the owner of the place we were supposed to stay is going to collect the money we paid to Agoda and then pass it on to the owners of this guest house in turn. So we have an absolutely beautiful room with a view of snow and bamboo covered mountain sides. Only problem is we will probably run out of cash before our stay is up if we are spending $70 per meal so we may have to run down into the city to find an ATM. No ATM up here.

This area looks like it would be amazing in the summer. Beautiful hiking trails and mountain biking. Major fail on my part taking us to a summer resort in January but in some ways it turned out for the best. Just like in Nanxun we pretty much have the place to ourselves. There is a hiking trail behind our resort called "Ancient Road Through the Forest." We hiked about a quarter mile up. We had to walk through snow that was 4 to 12 inches deep the whole way. It runs next to a stream through forested hillsides. It almost seems like hiking in Colorado until you realize that the tall trees are actually gigantic timber bamboo. They look a bit like pine trees from a distance and up close they have trunks like a good sized aspen tree. After the hike we came home and had dinner. Four courses this time at Cloud Mirror; chicken soup, tomato omelet, and two other veggie dishes from the snowed under gardens. Not sure what this one will cost since they are just running a tab for us. I'm going to hitch into the nearest town with an ATM tomorrow and max out the ATM card! More hiking after that.