Yagou

March 12th,
Went on a great class trip today: a five hour hike through the hills around Yagou, a small country town about an hour and a half from Harbin. The scenery was lovely. Rolling hills, fallow cornfields, Heilongjiang's rich black soil peeking through the melting snow, and frost covered pine trees. Some of the highlights: a rock wall covered with prehistoric carvings, a World War 2 bunker, and a fire tower with great views but a hair-raising ascent. Some of the harder parts of the hike included hiking in the snow, dealing with the cold (though after we started walking it warmed up and even felt a little hot under my sweater), and at one point we almost lost the trail but managed to spot faint footprints from a few days before. The farmland we drove past on the trip over was truly lovely. Unlike in Liaoning where the average family has about 6 mu or one acre per family, or ultra-crowded Sichuan where some families have as little as 1 mu (1/6th of an acre a family), families in Heilongjiang average 30 mu or about 5 acres. This meant farms seemed larger here than in other places I'd been in China. At one point on the hike we passed a pig farm and I noticed a large number of dead rats in front of the gate to the complex. Plague? The work of the cute though tough guard dogs? The cold? At one point we had fun resting along the side of the path, throwing snowballs and eating lunch. We finished the hike with dinner at a restaurant back near campus.