Camping at Xiang Shan

I love living in small communities like our AIAN family because there is a high concentration of outdoorsy adventurous people. Three of our school families, as well as five of our school teachers took a trip to the Elephant Mountain (Xiang Shan) beach this weekend, despite a forcasted typhoon and a front of thunder storms. It was the most perfect weekend.

Passport Sitch:
Even though we were "camping", when we arrived on Friday, everyone had full intentions of staying at the nearby resort that first night as it was pouring down rain and already after dark. But I forgot my passport :( which you need for checking in. I was assured that as a whole group of laowai, I wouldn't stick out in any way and that no one would notice my extra presence. Of course, why would the carrot head stick out? The moment we gathered in the lobby, a Chinese guy waded through our entire group and held his iphone up to my face. Then he showed me the screen. I guess I was skyping with his friend! OH yes, I won't stick out at all.

The Weather:
I was continuously made fun of the whole time leading up to the trip since my mediocre weather skillz lead us to camp at Xiang Shan beach, instead of a sparsely populated, zero-internet, island that was even closer to the impending Category 5 Typhoon Samba. I mean, I don't mind camping in the rain at all, but really? Typhoons can change direction unpredictably and it just didn't seem smart to pack my tarpless tent that fits 2 Chinese people and take a ferry to an island, without infrastructure, without emergency services and really just without anything. So we stuck to the mainland beaches and camped close to a hotel, just in case. It rained our first morning, but that didn't stop us from body surfing or beach volleyball. The rain stopped in time for us to cook some dinner, pitch our tents, and waited until we had packed up the next morning before it started sprinkling again. Really, that was quite considerate of the rain.

For the rest ... I'll let the pics tell the story

The pillow in our hotel room.

Kate and the kissing fish pillows in our hotel room.

Entertaining ourselves while we wait for lunch.
Two corners must not be touching any other cards and JENGA! don't let it fall! Or you get to gan bei!

Our camp on the beach.

Making Stews.

It really did turn out to be an all right day.

A curious tourist came to help us chop potatoes.

Best idea ever! Thank Chilean families for making quesadilla appetizers to be cooked
on  top of our stews. Yum yum yum!

It was all a good idea, until this happened.
Oh high tide, you were not quite this high at 7 am this morning!

So we did a make shift camp above the seawall on the stones.
There goes our tenting on the beach idea.

Happy campers! Sitting around the charcoal telling scary stories :)

Kate and I shared a tent!

When it says "sleeps 2", in China I think they were refering to shorter people.
Our feet hung out the edge.

And as we were attempting to make breakfast, the sun came out the next morning.
Naturally we all broke out into the wave!

For further awesome stories, such as intruding Chinese tourists and a bright orange spider, do set up a skype date :)