Today we headed south to Yellow River Hoodoo National Geopark and Yellow River Stone Forest. The place is located south of Zhongwei and north of Lanzhou and on the west side of Yellow River.
Plenty of activities are planned for today. But we had a simple lunch in a village home restaurant.
We drifted down the Yellow River on goat skin raft. The animal body and skeletons are skillfully extracted and the skin are then processed to make it watertight before air is pumped in and sealed to act as a floatation device. About dozen of these animal floats are then tied neatly together. A wooden platform is rigged on top of the goat skin floats to form a raft. It was the ancient way of river transportation. See picture below.
The goat skin rafts when stacked up along the shores
The raft float on water
The raft basically drifted downstream and the oarsman control it's direction. On completion, it is hauled upstream for the next use.
Our next activities was riding up the Stone Forest Mountain on a donkey cart to view the beautiful rock formation. The cart move slowly to give us time to appreciate the beautiful scenery.
It was about 3 km trek and I was amazed by the fitness of the aged donkey handler who choose to walk. A few times the donkey was not so cooperative with the handler.
Beautiful and unique rock formation curved out by the environment
After a full day of exciting activities, our driver, Xiaowang drove to Lanzhou. We didn't stayed in the city centre but instead stayed in New Lanzhou. A very impressive modern city just north of the ancient city.
No comments:
Post a Comment