January 2012 - Sai Kung and GuiZhou

Chris

Chris

Brian doing his normal airport shuffle in ShenZhen airport first class lounge. He had to break his arm to get the first class treatment.

I bought a couple of hundred pounds of fireworks thinking that it would impress the neighbors.

And was surprised to find that all the neighbors ( hundreds of them ) each had about 500 pounds of their own fireworks.

And the sky at midnight was like nothing I have ever seen anywhere.

This is Daisy's parent's appartment, on the right, and this scene went on for ages and to some extent for a week, in all directions.

GuiYang city along the HuaXi river.

Brian likes to spend a lot of time outdoors exploring the countryside.

Dating back to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368--1644), Qingyan town was built for military reasons. Because of its geographical location, Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor of Ming Dynasty established it as a station for transferring military messages and to house a standing army. Now it is somewhat of a tourist attraction just a short ride from Daisy's parent's house.

Baba & FuLing Ge

The long train ride through the mountains to WeiNing, which as the bird flies is about 150 miles west of GuiYang, in the middle of the part of GuiZhou that sticks out into the neck of the chicken’s head of YunNan. It is a five to seven hour train ride through poor coal mining and farming towns in typical GuiZhou karst landscapes where frozen ice covered mountains of limestone rock are cultivated to grow what appear to be more rocks. Or, possibly frozen January is simply not a growing season in these higher altitude towns.

Pushing through the ice on Cao Hai lake near WeiNing in the early morning.

Duck!

We learned a lot on CaoHai lake. For example: Duck, Cormorant, Gull - they are all birds.

Black-neck Cranes are rare. In fact, it is considered taboo to cook them at all. In the 1970s, when CaoHai lake was drained to advanced farming in the impoverished WeiNing area; this photo would have included half the total population of this species in GuiZhou. Even today not much is known about this bird. From what I read, it appears possibly ten to twenty percent of the global population spends January on CaoHai lake in GuiZhou.

The Black-neck Crain has a 14 inch esophagus which loops inside the body enabling its chilling long distance calls. If you could talk long distance on your esophagus, you might do without a hand phone.

We also learned that there are many types of gulls, but there has never been any variety named Seagull. Is this a Black Headed Gull ?

In Chinese history 'heavenly cranes' (tian-he) or 'blessed cranes' (xian-he) are messengers of wisdom. Legendary Taoist sages are transported between heavenly worlds on the backs of cranes.

Friends and bird watchers :-)