Chong Yang

This was the day we went to the city where Wren lived most of her first year. The guide and driver met us at our hotel at 8am and we were off on the 3.5 hour drive. It was still raining but at least we were in a van and not walking around. Our guide was a 24 year old graduate student who goes by the English name Macy. She is getting her post grad degree in journalism. She said she would later like to go to get further education at the University of Missouri b/c they have one of the best journalism programs. Our driver was a very kind man named Mr. Jio. He said he had a 22 year old daughter in college so my guess is that he was around 50. He didn't speak any English so we did very little talking with him accept a few things here and there with Macy translating.

The drive was very interesting seeing the countryside and the sites such as water buffalo and people working in the field and on boats in the river and such. I was most surprised by the mountains as I had envisioned the whole area to be flat land.

view of mountains while driving

Once we arrived in Chong Yang Macy told us that there were 8 villages in Chong Yang county with the village of Chong Yang being the largest. It seemed to be similar in size to Birmingham but you could tell the people were not quite as well off as in some of the bigger towns. It also seemed to be fairly agricultural. We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant and Macy ordered us some tasty vegetarian dishes - the most interesting being a local dish of lotus root. We paid for the meal and the total for all 5 of was something like $15.00!

After lunch we drove up to a very small village to see a scenic spot where a dam had been built and created a very beautiful resevoir at the base of the mountains.



boat on reservoir

It was while we were looking around this village with the reservoir that we found out how kind our driver Mr. Jio was. He had driven us over to where we could view the dam and as we were walking down the road I spotted this beautiful blue bird with a long beak just sitting on the ground in the rain. Jason got a photo of the bird on the big camera but I forgot to get one with the iPod. Mr. Jio said it was a local bird that uses its beak to fish. He picked the bird up in his hand and covered it with a tissue and carried it until it was dry enough and could fly away. I figure that only a very kind person would take this kind of care with a wild bird.

Afterward, we drove back to the hotel and had a break before we all went back to the same spot for another tasty dinner. After dinner we went back to the hotel in order to get ready for our big visit to Wren's Social Welfare Institute (SWI).