You must visit this mountain before you die. Seriously.

As you can probably see, it was fairly cloudy and foggy. The result was an mysterious, ethereal and overall stunning atmosphere. Alas, it also made taking photos quite difficult with my fairly basic camera!

The ascent wasn’t too difficult — about two and a half hours of climbing steps. What was a hassle, was the many workers hauling goods up the side of the mountain with us (to supply the hotel and other commercial operations at the summit). This led to some tight and potentially dangerous situations. For the lazy, there was the option of a cable car, at the not-to-cheap price of around 85 yuan (to put things in perspective, a bus ticket from Yancheng to Nanjing is about 80 yuan).

It’s really hard to illustrate the sense of scale there was when climbing Huang Shan. In the photo above, you can make out people climbing a near-vertical staircase… Unfortunately, I could not fit both parts of that peak into the shot from my vantage point.

The fog was clearly visible and semi-fluid… It often seemed like an peculiar organism.

See all of the photos in the photo gallery.

Well I’m most definitely chuffed: C-Dogs SDL has finally made its way into the Gentoo Portage tree!

Which is cool after waiting 8 months… hehe…

So if you’re using Gentoo, and wish to test it out, simply:

$ echo "games-arcade/cdogs-sdl *-" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
$ emerge games-arcade/cdogs-sdl
$ cdogs

For more details, check out the Gentoo Online Package Database Page for cdogs-sdl.

Now I really should get around to releasing 0.4 while I’m at it… ;-)

Nanjing

Nanjing ( lit. ’south capital’ ) is certainly one of the more beautiful cities in China — trees line virtually every main road, and the city itself is bordered by mountains, the Yangtze river and the old city walls. There is a certain charm to the place which is not seen in Beijing, which supplanted it as national capital.

We (most of us GAPers from Jiangsu) all tried to visit the Nanjing Massacre War Memorial, but, alas, it was closed for renovations (until November!) Slightly peturbed, we visited the Xuanwu lake. The lake (and the couple of islands in the middle) were impressive, and much fun was had playing pirate with the electric boats. Had a good lunch, then some tandem bike shenanigans.

Zhenjiang

The last stage of traveling to Zhenjiang was the spectacular — a huge suspension bridge spanning the Yangtze river. One could see the barges slowly ploughing the river, carrying all sorts of cargo.

This (I dare say) “junket” was financed by the local government — I suppose they figured it was in their interests to have lots of foreigners looking at the various things they chose to show us — a special school (for mainly the deaf), a bamboo screen factory (woven by hand, often taking several weeks for each piece), a clothes factory, the old administration complex (quite a few European buildings), a model farm, a new school (and became an instant celebrity. hah!) and a temple.

Two other GAPers were there with Joe and I — Andrew and Hugh. It was good to catch up again, and various amusing things transpired involving beer which I shall not go into much depth about.