Spring Festival Travels

The last month has mostly been spent traveling, since our semester ended (which means a 5 week spring break started), thus the lack of update/communication...but I'm back! Places visited include: in Thailand... Chiangmai, northwest countryside, Bangkok, and a southern resort town; in China...Shenzhen (just across the border from Hong Kong), Yulin (northern Shaanxi province), and Hong Kong.

Three of my friends and I met in the Bangkok airport, flew up to Chiangmai, rented motorcycles and biked around northern Thailand. It was incredible - fun riding the bikes, amazing views, delicious food, and good times playing cards and exploring the towns we stayed in. I found it restful to ride all day through mountains or looking over fields and villages for the five days, and then hanging out in the evenings at a coffee shop or guesthouse.

The woman we rented bikes had this look of terror as we rode off, as if she was hoping to see four bikes and four people all intact at the end, but not necessarily expecting it.

We stored our big backpacks at the hostel in Chiangmai, then put our 5 days of things in bookbags, tied them onto the bag of our bikes, and took off!
Day 1: visited Tiger Kingdom. Yes, that is a real live tiger. No, it's not photoshop. Yes, I'm petting it. No, it's not tied down at all.
Some of the views...

You can see the road off to the right in the picture above.

the four of us at one of the viewpoints. Every once in a while, we stopped the bikes just to take pictures and enjoy the scenery - it was beautiful!

The highest point in Thailand. The trees sort of just dropped off into nothingness. (C, it just stops!)
Lots of pitch, spades, and euchre. This is in a bungalow, where we stayed the last night of our motorcycle trip.

Eating lunch on the river - literally.

On my way home, S and I went to Hong Kong for a couple days. Neither of us had been there, and it was impressive!

The view at night from the Peak.

Check out more pictures here.