The Sacred Mountain Odysseys website is being reviewed for final content approval.
Excitement is in the air and the time is right to start sharing with the world our 25 years of research and adventures! Stay tuned here to learn about one-of-a-kind books and movies, that document ancient history, myths and legends discovered during our China expeditions!
With two months of hard work behind us, we realize that we will not have a book ready for the Colorado Country Christmas show in early November. Now we’re debating with ourselves about taking time to create a 2016 calendar, so we have something to bring to the show.
We know that we can't do all of this by ourselves and that stories benefit by having a fresh set of eyes to look at them. So, we've been asking around in the editing field, hoping to find someone who lives nearby, is willing to meet with us and might be interested in our work. (We've heard that some editors don't want to meet with the authors, which just doesn't feel right to us.)
The ‘Write A Book In Four Weeks’ class begins! Four weeks of trial and error. As this will be a huge learning curve, we're opting to tackle a smaller book first and pursue the coffee table photo essay book next.
So, here comes a book of stories about the awesome people we've met through the years of travels and research in China. Of the hundreds of travel experiences we have, we will need to pick a select few to write about.
We are figuring out how to structure the stories individually and as a whole book. Playing with story boarding. Researching book writing and writing styles.
Fellow Virtual Travelers,
Happy New Year with wishes for a prosperous and healthy 2015!
The busy holiday season is over, resolutions have been made, the endless routine of the new year has started and winter doldrums can start to set in. Do we ever have something to entertain you - Dennis has been busy with a new YouTube channel! Some of you may have seen these movies through the years of our friendships, but these will be new to most!
After our second martial arts school trip to China in 2000, Dennis made a movie to document the trip. Originally an hour long, we've broken the movie into these nine subtitles:
ChinaY2K#5-Pilgrimage
ChinaY2K#4-Tourism
ChinaY2K#2 Culture
ChinaY2K#7 MartialArts Changsha
ChinaY2K#1 Itinerary
ChinaY2K#9 MartialArts ShaolinTemple
ChinaY2K#6 MartialArts Tibet
ChinaY2K#3-Travel
ChinaY2K#8 MartialArts Xinning
Also enjoy these additional movie trailers:
Wudang Tapestry 2014 (a product of our trip to China last year)
China Archeology: Musical Bronze Bells
Driving in China Traffic
To view these twelve short movies, use a browser to go to the following link which will list all twelve movies, in one YouTube window:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=DenEyeFX
Or if the above link doesn't work, just go to http://www.youtube.com and search for:
DenEyeFX
Enjoy!
Blessings,
Dennis&Anita
Fellow Virtual Travelers,
Fall is in the air and we're reminded of our previous trips to China during the fall season. The Fairy Mountains of Wudang explode with its vibrant hues of yellow, orange and red! With the anticipation of fall and the return to school, our thoughts wander to the daily grind, or more diplomatically stated, daily life. Life in a different culture and environment may look different to what has become typical in America.
Eating
We talked before about packing snacks for the numerous hours we find ourselves on the trail and away from civilization. Nuts, granola, dried fruit, snack bars and M&M's make up a large portion of those snacks. And for those times when we're not up to boiled cabbage for breakfast, bring packets of oatmeal to cook up in the hotel room!
When dining out, expect to order one dish each and share on the center lazy susan on the table. Rice is readily available, but not always served unless asked for (it is considered a poor man's food, so the fear is that American guests would be offended with being served rice). You'll partake in delicious dishes containing ingredients that you don't recognize. We even came across some vegetables for which there is no English word!
The area in Hubei Province where Wudang is located, has a plethora of cuisines to choose from. Everything from the spicy foods common in Szechuan Province, to bland foods only boiled in water with nothing added for taste.
Water
Boiled or bottled. That's all you can trust. When out hiking, there may be no vendors along the way to buy bottled water from, so always bring enough water to get you back to civilization! However, don't ever use tap water! Buy water where you can and beyond that, here is the daily drinking water drill. There are hot water teapots in every room (sometimes their cords are too short to reach the plug, so you have to improvise!). Boil a pot of water at night. In the morning, pour cooled off boiled water into your water bottles. Set more water to boil before you leave the room for the day. The alternative is to bring water purifiers and spend time with either filtering water into your bottles, or using ultraviolet light to 'zap' your water pure (SteriPEN)!
Sleeping
Hotel rooms are typically smaller than those found in the U.S. Beds are smaller and not plush (at least not the hotels we stay in). The floor of our hotel on Wudang was tile and an air conditioner/heater was mounted on the wall beside the front window. The unit was run by a remote control and due to expense, we were encouraged to NOT use it!
Bathroom facilities
Most public restrooms have running water with sinks and more often than not the pit-style toilet. Most hotels we've stayed in on our journeys had western style toilets in the room's bathroom. This trip was different. The hotel we stayed in on the mountain, had a total of three rooms (one on top of the other). Only the top room had a western style toilet. That was left open for our use, when it wasn't being used by someone else. Now imagine hiking all day, coming back with sore knees, hip and leg muscles. Then squat to use the toilet facilities! Oh and the sewage systems can't handle toilet paper, so you throw away used paper in the waste baskets (and empty your trash daily)!
So, our quaint rooms had private bathrooms (one step up from the room) with a small free standing sink, a hot water heater hanging on the wall and a pit-style toilet. Of interest, the hand-held shower spray nozzle hung right next to the electrical power plug in for the hot water heater, so you had to be very careful about where you pointed the shower spray! And because the bathroom was small, you had to straddle the toilet pit, when taking a shower!
Laundry
In the remote regions of Wudang mountain, there are no washing machines or dryers. So hand wash what you can in your small bathroom sink, then hang parachute cord across the bedroom, tying one end to the wardrobe and the other end to the window curtain. Use safety pins or office paper clamps to hang up the clothes on the line (clothes pins are too bulky to pack).
Many hotels will provide basic laundry service. In our case Mrs. Yang (restaurant owner and hotel co-owner) charged us 5 yuan (about one US dollar) per shirt or pants. The laundry was hand washed in a big red bowl in front of the hotel on the sidewalk. Needless to say, we washed and dried all of our underwear in our hotel room!
During our three week stay, we only asked for our bed sheets to be changed once. And out came the big red bowl on the sidewalk!
Shopping
Our hotel on the mountain was along the shopping area of the Wuyaling Parking Lot. End of the road on that area of the mountain! Each shop sold pretty much the same tourist items: playing cards; fans; fake jade buddhas; coins; dragon and tiger statues; and scarves. And our favorite - a solar powered prayer wheel! All of this is contained in a room that is no larger than 10' by 10'! At night, the metal garage door is pulled down to close the shop and owners either walk up the stairway to their living quarters, or they retire to the room behind the shop.
No chance to use a credit card. Hope you brought Chinese currency! Dickering is very common and in the end, the American price is sometimes 10 times more than the price a local would get. One of the beautiful things about living among the people and staying for a period of time is that you get to know the shop owners. They wave and yell 'Hello' in Chinese, every time you walk by! We've even been humbled by receiving 'gifts' from the owners, knowing that they have so little and yet have big hearts for their foreign visitors, who are willing to live among them for so long!
Shopping in the city at the base of the mountain was similar to shopping on the mountain. We found a 'hardware store' which became a favorite for supplies! Because the air is humid, Anita splurged on a Chinese hair dryer (easier to just plug in, than to connect up the adapters each morning)!
Blessings,
Dennis&Anita
Fellow Virtual Travelers,
Two months ago today, we boarded the plane to begin our latest China adventure! After over 50 miles of hiking and traversing upwards of 20,000 steps, we returned with over 5,000 photographs to sort through and thousands of words of history digest.
In thinking back to those mountain trails, please enjoy some of the flora we encountered along the way!
Blessings,
Dennis&Anita
Fellow Virtual Travelers,
Happy Mother's Day to all! We've been safely back home now for 24 hours, having been awake for 36 hours straight to get home!
The jet lag has set in such that last night and today is largely a foggy dream. The kitties Sherlock and Dr. Watson are so happy to have their full-time slaves back! We owe a big Thank You to our friend Danielle, who took such good care of them in our home! They were relaxed when we got home and are needing lots of pets, laps and snuggles with us! Dr. Watson, who is only two years old, grew significantly in the last three weeks! Catching up to her big brother, Sherlock!
A big Thank You to Dennis' sister Brenda, who took us to and picked us up from DIA!
We have deposited the suitcases and the shoes we wore on the trip, in the garage where they will stay until we get them disinfected. They have been places and seen germs that you don't even want to know about!
We were greeted this morning with a Springtime Colorado snowstorm - have accumulated about four inches already! Fortunately Anita had filled up the wood barrels before we left, so that we'd have dry wood when we got home.
Logging into GoogleMail never worked well in China, though it had been fine on the 2012 trip. Making contingency plans were worth the while, as we were able to keep in touch via our Skybeam email accounts to the ShaolinExpedition list.
While we are connected with some of our Chinese friends on Facebook, we never could login to facebook.com while in China.
We figure in the last 3 weeks, we walked almost 100 miles, including around 10,000 stairs. We rose to the challenges, made adjustments as needed and just powered through seemingly impossible situations at times!
Between the two of us, we have brought back over 5,000 photos, a few hours of video and nearly 100 pages of Wudangshan history, folklore and legends. That doesn't include what information Master Karl gleaned or the photos he took!
Attached are some snapshots of life in China.
Thank you for following us on our adventure, for your interest and support during this adventure! It is good to be back home!
Blessings,
Dennis&Anita
Website and photography © Anita Lunt 2016 - 2024