Hokay another one, and it’s just day 2 of 10.

Day 2: Travel from Chengdu to Hailuogou.

Photos of the full Day 2 album as usual on Flickr and Facebook too!

Flickr: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjyzR6F8

Facebook: on.fb.me/y4VRha

Hailuogou is a nice glacier forest park located in Sichuan, about 319KM away from Chengdu. Fascinating scenery, about 3000 plus feet (or was it meters) up. Technically it’s a snow mountain of sorts. But Day 2 is just the travelling to the town there, and along the way, stopped by a small town to tour around too.

Huang Long Xi Town, about an hour from Chengdu itself. Frankly have no idea where it’s located exactly, kinda in the middle of nowhere for that matter. You won’t even see it properly on Google Maps if you bothered searching…

But hey, here we are, with photos…

You don’t exactly see locals here though, kinda of a small tourist town trying to making a living out of visitors passing through…

A nice dressing gown shop…

Small things were cute too… Like the way they’re afraid someone will steal their spot lights on the floor…

Until now I still don’t quite get the heritage of the place. But then again everywhere in China you see roughly the same things.

Love their brooms…

Again, no idea what this is… Thought I’ll only see this in jails.. Like everyone is stuck and infused into a wall…

CCTV… It’s surprising to even find something remote technologically advanced here…

And of course… a dog..

And just like the other tourist attraction from Day 1, everything seems… closed.. But then again, we weren’t looking in the right place…

More “China English Signs”… Correct me if I’m wrong but this look like a poem of sorts.. With a literal translation.. Epic..

There’s my dad… Always videoing away… Fascinating sight…

It was only after a while that the tour guide came back to find us to wonder why…. we didn’t walk forward… Amazing right… There wasn’t even so much as a signboard to guide anyone around the place…

This… is a turtle I think… Supposedly in a river of sorts.. That.. dried up…

Tea house!

And you don’t see this a lot either… Tree logs across the river!

Grinding mill.. I think.. It’s not working though…

There’s my dad again!

And also, just like everything else in huang long xi town, this was also a display of sorts.. A well…

Something new too… Some spinning wheel of sorts….. Couldn’t quite figure out the productivity value of this device though. Probably they modified it…

More turtles in the river… Sure it’ll look awesome when water is actual flowing down the river…

One Chinese eatery… Didn’t go in though…

BBQ meat… looks a lot like kebabs right…

Spotted another food-seller, this time on the outside! Now this one definitely caught my eye… I mean, how could fried stuff not…

It’s a terrible attempt at a self photo with the seller…

These are awesome……. Like my favourite food….

And there’s more… Flowing soup….

More CCTVs….

And finally we decided to try the wheel thing earlier… Although it says “Do Not Climb” but I mean come on… we didn’t just fly thousands of kilometers for nothing did we…

Oh finally a different design!

Oh this was interesting… self made candy.. by hand.. in the wide open…

It’s pretty much like Sticky Candy but a whole lot better. These folks were practically doing acrobatic stunts WITH the candy… Just look at the sequence!

Apparently we were told that it gets better after a while.. So we went off to walk other places too.. People building houses.

Surprisingly we found an arcade of sorts too! Out in the open! Basketball….

And a “firing range” of sorts… Shooting balloons with air pellets…

Going back to the acrobatic candy… This is the better part… Literally stunts.. And it’s heavy too.

Moving on from there, more wooden displays. This one of a “water movement” wheel.

And an interesting way to use their old “bucket on the shoulder” devices, as dustbins.

More small Chinese kids, something you don’t really see very often either given their OCP. This one’s got like a “go get your own candy-on-a-stick”. Angsty much.

More children! On an excursion tour apparently. But man they were noisy.

This one was cool too. A “swimming dragon”, with the floor as the water.. Cool..

More broken english signs…

And some floss candy stuff.

Bamboo wooden chairs…

This was rather “acrobatic” too! But these time by old folks… Slamming peanut candy with their wooden hammers.

Caramel candy… Okay we were kinda done with it at this point, realizing that there wasn’t much else to view. On a positive note, no one actually harassed us into buying anything, it was actually a peaceful shopping trip.

Back in a parking lot… Careful where you park your cars! You never know where they might end up. And oh, careful on the China roads, you never know when some parent decides to let their kids pee on the road… No wonder their roads are filthy.

Traveling on from there, everything was fairly misty low, no sky in sight, pretty gloomy feel really. But the traffic is nice to observe.

Moving to the highway for that 300KM trip to Hailuogou…

Spotted this sign too! Supposedly speeding is okay, but overspeeding is not. Interesting eh? Cars do speed by at relatively fast speeds too. And their buses, including the ones that we are on, are like those fast ones on a Malaysian Expressway at night.

Left hand drive toll booths…

Nothing much else on the way to see really, until we got off the expressway onto the communal roads. Stopped by a fuel station to top up diesel for the bus, and saw this. These kids were actually treating everywhere like their playground! But they had joy. On a pile of sand…

And fuel prices also shot up through the roof in china, from what used to be like $1.50RMB/L to what now is like $6.50RMB/L… Look closed at the photo! The total cost of filling up a bus is like more than RMB10000! How often do you see that figure on a fuel pump?

Moving on from the fuel kiosk into the small roads of China and into the rural areas, it’s amazing how much scenery you can take in from mother nature.. So beautiful. Think this was a railway bridge…

Dirt roads in China…

And our lunch rest stop. For a while we thought they had collapsed or closed down. But thankfully the one who stayed there was the tour guide’s wife and family! So turns out they were only renovating the first storey of it. Though, it didn’t quite help when the second storey turned out to have no electicity. So no heater or lights for that matter. Pretty interesting way to spending lunch on a tour, probably how a mission trip would feel like I suppose, in a stricken town.

Sign in the toilet…

And their apartments! Look at that goose hanging just outside!

And after lunch, hanging out for a while with the tour guide’s daughter…

More sights from China’s rural areas! A small hydroelectric dam.

Tunnels through mountains in China, these are awesome works of engineering. Stopped for a toilet break… Observed the scenery and all.

Hailuogou!…

God knows what happened to this poor car. Poor thing.

The entrance to the Er Long Shan tunnel.. If I do remember correctly, is about 4.3KM long to be exact.. Awesome structure..

It’s a pretty long… nearly 10mins actually. Appearing on the other side of the mountain to yet another roadside town.

AND THIS IS WHERE IT GOT REALLY INTERESTING! These are where all the mountain scenery came in! Amazingly right! Completely different sceneries on different side of a 4.3KM tunnel of a mountain.

Doesn’t really look THAT impressive for now, but you don’t see this everyday do you? It’s a really surreal feeling to be engulfed in mother nature, at the valley of mountain ridges everywhere, with rivers flowing through. Like an awesome…

Ended with reaching the hotel we were staying at Hailuogou. Beautiful scenery all around of course.

Okay first off, I haven’t done one of these in a LONG time. By that I mean, one of those super long graphic intensive “try to recount everything” kind of post. But I’ve no idea how appealing that might be. Hence, I don’t do this very often either.

Anyhows, this is the summarized version so not all images are displayed. For the full album of about 139 photos, do visit the following links.

Flickr: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjyuwf1n

Facebook: on.fb.me/ycOhl3

So… recently (or rather back in Dec 2010), went for a 10D family holiday to Chengdu and neighboring parts with my family. This is just Day 1. From Singapore to Chengdu.

I think this is much better than lugging heavy boxy luggages around no? For a family of 6, it does seem ok I suppose.

Last meal in SG while waiting for the flight… @ Astons T1

Air ticket… Unfortunately Singapore Airlines doesn’t fly to Chengdu, although SilkAir does, though they only have day timings. So flew with Air China instead.. on a ridiculous 2am flight. Never am I taking overnight flights again, unless maybe it’s super far away like Europe or Japan or the States.

Can’t help it you know… It’s just trying to while the time away while waiting for the flight… Which as far as I know, is always late

And while roaming around T1 and T2′s transit lounges in search for a charger for my Eneloop batteries, came across this.

I’m quite sure there’s something about misrepresentation in sales or something… Imagine I could possibly get a Mac Pro for just 1.5k. That’s… cheap…

And finally. 2am. The ungodly hour of flying… On a rather small Airbus 333 bound for Chengdu. Flight was full by the way.

Perhaps I’m a little accustomed to flying on Singapore Airlines with the relatively nice leg space, larger planes and nicer seats, flying China Airlines was like flying a budget airline for me. Not that I’ve been on one, but it seems like it.

And after a 4 hour flight, of which I got 0 hours of sleep due to the uncomfortable ride…

First order of the day was breakfast! Poor driver and tour guide had just finished their previous tour at 8pm the previous night when they sent them back to Singapore. It seems as though they have no rest.

There were chinese buns, fried stuff with some meat inside and of course the beancurd.

The best part was the noodles though. My goodness were they tasty.

Never crossed my mind that China has such urban looking apartments…

And there’s like folks doing their morning exercise too… In the cold…

So first stop was this… uh… park of sorts. I had no idea whether it was on the official tour list at all, because frankly, there wasn’t much to view…

The all time favourite “broken English” signboards.

They had these bike parking stations all over Chengdu apparently….

Told you, nothing much to see as yet…

My sister… freezing no doubt…

And this dude in a water ride… Just casually going across the lake to the island in the middle…

My brother… Taking over photo taking since I was shivering in my pants without winter clothing…

Rest of my family…

There’s nothing much really. There was no one else except the one or two locals there to probably make sure the place wasn’t… fully closed…

And this is apparently a model of the plan they have to mordenize Chengdu or something like that. Not downtown Chengdu, but more on the suburbs.

And oh I love this…

Complaint room for visitors… How interesting…

Oh and they have these attachable muffins on their electric bikes…

And while continuing to kill time….

I presume this was some sort of a cab….

Then we went further down to visit this other park… A better looking one at that….

And of course, killing more time….

Doesn’t this remind you of.. that something in Paris? Without the pot at the top though…

Folks practicing wushu or something….

Luckily they then put us on these motorized.. uh.. mega buggies. I have no idea what you call them. They’re buggies.. but can take like 15 people at a go.

Next order of interest is lunch….

“The Future” they called themselves… Not very futuristic inside though…

And finally on the streets of downtown Chengdu…

Folks trying their luck at catching a bite in the canals…

High rise apartment buildings…

Yellowing trees!

For some reason, if I do remember correctly, they had nothing for us to do or something. So tour guide dropped us off at a shopping district in downtown Chengdu to roam around for an hour or 2.

There’s just so much real estate everywhere. They really make full use of every inch of displayable space to hang banners and billboards and LED screens. You don’t seem these very often in Singapore of course… All you see are A2 or A1 posters at bus stops, and LED screens covered by trees *AHEM* Orchard Central *AHEM*

What I think could be their transformer box…

There just so much space to walk around….

And how could we not mistake this… It was cold, we were tired, fitted the bill perfectly.

That was like.. the highlight of the day…

Next order of interest, dinner! And in true China style, they had rice in all sorts of containers wherever we went, and a massive donation of oil to every table.

I mena, look at the amount of oil left on my plate! And this was after I fished the food out of the serving dishes with chopsticks…

There was nothing else for the night.. So we took upon ourselves to roam around the nearby streets of the hotel we were staying at.

True China style of hanging their sausages… Anywhere…

No it wasn’t snowing as yet… Not cold enough apparently…

One of the stores among dozens that were still open.

If I’m not wrong, these were some of their local living quarters…

The hotel we were staying at… Can’t remember the english name now, but one of the more modern buildings in the area…

Nice beds and all… Fairly nicely decorated in fact… The perks on going on a tour group… Don’t need to share overcrowded hotel rooms…

Okay check this out… This is the first time I’ve ever encountered this…

See what’s interesting?

The bathroom window! My goodness… That’s the showering area by the way, in full view of the whole room. I can’t quite fantom what the use of it might be, or what the designer had in mind when he designed the room. “Something new” indeed…

A cold 9 degrees…. Where to get Wifi you might ask….

Free… And since there’s no Facebook and Twitter, set up our own wifi hotspots in the hotel room and proxy our way to the world outside China’s firewalls…

So end of the first day, technically didn’t do much except like, get accustomed to the cold weather, and rest after that ridiculous uncomfortable flight… Seems like flying during the day time wouldn’t have made much of a difference I suppose?

Okay still editing Day 2 photos, shall post them up in another post on a 1 post per day basis… It gets better though don’t worry…

Am actually thinking of redoing the design of this blog. Sure this theme is functional, useable and overall I think it’s pretty much minimalistic.

But I think it needs a refresh. (Clearly that banner at the top needs a change, but the code’s got all wonky and I can’t. So… Hence the need for change)

Thing is, most of the WordPress themes nowadays feature a large image scroller where no doubt you have nice fancy photos or graphics where (most of the time) you probably go wow, or if you don’t, it’s at least visually pleasing.
But face it, until I end up earning money running this website, be it running advertisements or entering just what I have running through my mind, that’s not gonna happen any time soon.

Still searching for a suitable, cluster-free, simplistic, fairly blog-like theme to change to. I d welcome your suggestions, please enter them into the comment box below.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes this is a website no doubt, a dotcom. But it is still in fact a blog per se. Though of course I’m also gonna have to relook and pretty much rethink what I can post or can’t post on here (with SOPA and all that nonsense going around).

Of course, those praise and worship videos, lyrics and chords won’t go away. There’re pretty much here to stay.

Cheers all.

If anyone were smart enough, he/she will know where to find me.

The response to a phone call, says a lot about the r/s between the 2 parties.

Went down to the SAF film unit today for a one-day crash course of the Video Production Course. Really feels good to be in a different environment, especially one where people actually speak in the lingo that you’re used to listening to.

Fought Z monster though, and we all know, when the Z monster comes, there’s no way to deflect it. Bummer. Haha. But not like it makes a difference though.

Anyhow, the culture is different too. There’s OCS on one side, where the poor cadets are shouting their lungs off while doing early morning route march, like recruits. Feel sad for them man. Then there’s CLME where I was at. Very different culture and attitudes. And they have awesome editing suites as well. Brand spanking new ones for that matter. Ahem.. 12-core Mac Pro. Ahem. Bummer. Mine’s only 8. But works wonderfully as it is. Haha.

Anyhow, mind’s drifiting off to sleep already. Hoping for Universal Studios on 21st and/or 22nd. Haha. That’ll be awesome.

Let’s try that experiment this year again shall I…..

And perhaps it’s about time I wrote down my wish list too! How awesome is that.

I figured, that maybe if I were to write more on this page without withdrawing from whether people are actually viewing it or not, there might actually be more content of my life being poured into this electronic place.

Not that I keep a paper diary of sorts, but at some point in time I did write on another blog, a password-protected one. But that blog also went dead because of the changes in my life. There were loopholes in that system to say the least. Trust and doubt was the main issue I suppose.

So for the most part of the time when I’m not blogging, I’ve been blogging in my mind, or “blogging” with God. Having chats with Him were, and still is, comforting.

So yeah, some what of a a revelation from a close friend, I was reminded that WordPress does have a feature where you can password protect selected entries. Now why didn’t I think of that. So now I could just focus on digitizing all my brain matter, all in one place. Here.

Sometimes when I read blogs, it amazed me how little someone can say, but it means a lot. I really admire the power of language in that sense. Poems, songs. So much underlying meanings to them. Frankly, am still struggling with trying to pick up productivity every since GKS’s grand idea kicked into my life, not that I have a choice for that matter.

Past couple of weeks, mostly the weekends, have been wonderful. Always appreciate the great company that God has blessed me with. Every single day, I always thank God for the few people in my life that I truly appreciate with all of my heart. Because of the things that they have done for me, however insignificant it might be, I truly appreciate it.

.

Now I’m just wondering, will anyone actually remember. Did that “social experiment” thing last year, but the results were kinda woozy. And also, have a great idea of how to spend the day, preferably with chosen friends, oh dreams are so great.

Though there’s always the fears. Overcoming is a mad thought when you have no idea what’s on the other side, especially when you’re so comfy with the current side right now. I need guidance. And if the horoscope thingy (which for a long time I’ve been treating as a “coincidence where possible”), at SG Flyer is true, then God just guide me. If it isn’t already glaring out in the open for all to see already?

Or perhaps this is the way guys and girls are wired individually, still trying to make sense of it all. But God has His timings, and by experience, they are always at the right time, at the most awesomeness of times. But the process of awaiting those timings are sometimes, in extreme cases, excruciatingly annoyingly painful to wait.

For what it’s worth, “no one puts new wine in old wineskin”. Mentioned 4 times in the Bible. Must mean something doesn’t it. Obvious enough no?

Faith, Love, Hope. Oh God bless my English too.