Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping) Festival

We visited our friend’s family for our vacation this long weekend.  After driving to Changning, Hunan (620 km away), which took a long time since we had to fight the other billion people travelling, we paid respects to the relatives that had passed on.  At first it seemed like a sweet flower planting, weed-pulling time.  Then they turned on the miniature explosions, and Jared was worried that the skeletons were going to be unearthed.

That evening, as some of the relatives went to visit other relatives, we stayed to play on the roof of Amy’s parent’s very large (9-bedroom?) home.  There was plenty of dirt and wooden planks and such to keep an 8-year old boy quite happy.  The only thing threatening to sour the mood was the setting sun.  Here, Jared started with an innocent scale, and then began to catapult small chairs at the unsuspecting Brickuns (creatures that apparently live in the lower part of the brick wall behind him).

The next day, after waking up early, we went to Hengshen Mountain, where many similar minded folk ventured to pray to Buddha and other statues built for specific family names and occupations.  Before we boarded the bus to go part-way up the monstrous mountain, Jared enjoyed climbing everything in sight.

Amy and I are ringing the bell to get Buddha’s attention.

Here’s the scary bus that almost flung us off the mountainside.

Jared got a 1 yuan whistle, and tried to train me on it (here’s what I’ll whistle if I need you, this one means come, this one means go away, this one means yes, this one means no…)

This is pretty much everybody that came in the two cars.  Karl and Ella couldn’t join us because Ella decided to catch a cold a few days before the (hastily) [un]scheduled trip.

I’m trying to keep up with my energetic and adventurous kid, here.  This was really steep, and if I didn’t have that sense of love and obligation, I probably wouldn’t have tried to follow.  He was really happy to get to the top, and not even need a path.

Jared and his friend (Amy’s neice) YaoHui got to be royal part-way up and down the mountain.  He loved helping his “subjects” get exercise.  The two of them also enjoyed getting their pants massively dirty on the gutter-slides next to the temple steps.

Such a beautiful hike.

Some of us got tired (this is BenBen, Amy’s cousin’s kid), so we went back down by bus again, instead of hiking for 3 more hours.  Before crashing at another hotel, we made a side-trip to drop off Amy’s cousin’s dad to spend a few days with her mom (house in ZhuZhou).

This toilet pic is worth a few more words than I care to put down.

Dinner was cooked for us over a dry-leaf-fed fire.  There’s her dad feeding the fire.  The pot is on the other side with her mom cooking the food.

The food was mostly fine.  Jared was such a good sport about eating whatever I put into his bowl after various people commented on how he should try this or that.  I tried to put it into my bowl usually, but sometimes they were more persistent about having him try it, too.

We passed a lot of farming land on the way home.  I loved getting so many gorgeous pictures portraying the life here.  It was also fun to see others enjoying their festival in the same surprising firecracker-on-the-graves manner.  Maybe you can see a little smoke in the distance.  I also observed a very large fire in the middle of a forested area.  Besides being sad to miss that photo, I hope everything was under control.