The Snowy River Campus is one of the 3 School for Student Leadership campuses in Victoria, Australia. In 2016, they had a partnership with Victorian Young Leaders to China, a Chinese Government initiative designed to get Victorian students to China so they could learn Mandarin, and form a love for China, and a connection with it. I heard about this opportunity and was really excited by the idea of it, so I applied, was interviewed, and went to China for 6 weeks. The entire program was 9 weeks long, so for the first 3 we went to Snowy, met all the other students from around Victoria who we were going to China with, and prepared ourselves to be thrown into a whole new country and culture. During my time in China, I kept a blog. Click on the photos below for some highlights.
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Day 1: Arrival & Set Up After a bus trip, walk through customs to get into Hong Kong and another bus to a dock, we hopped on a boat that took us to a small fishing village. A 20 minute walk over the hill brought us to a little beach that would be ours for the next week. Day 1
We spent last week somewhere between Utahloy (the school we're staying at) and Heishan. Monday night and Tuesday night were spent in a hotel in Liannan, a city on the way to Heishan. It took us about 4 hours to drive there from Utahloy on Monday morning. When we got to the hotel, we dropped our bags and met in the hotel lobby to hop back on the bus, this time destined for a village close by. The wet market this morning was so hot! We split into groups and went around to look at the market for an hour. One of the first stalls we went to had more plastic there than I'd ever seen in one place. There were biscuits individually wrapped in plastic and washing pegs the same.
Last night we talked about Buddhism, where it came from, how it is practiced, and what it involves. We were split into groups and we each had to come up with a question about Buddhism. My group's question was; 'What practices does Buddhism involve?'
WE MADE IT TO CHINA!!!
Having flown for 9 hours over Australia and then the very South of Southern China, we were pretty relieved to see the glittering orange lights of Guangzhou. Although we did only see them for a few seconds between big clouds of who-knows-what, they were reassuring all the same. Day 9 and 10.
We spent the last two days hiking and bike riding, from Snowy to Cape Conran and back. We walked for about 10kms along the beach on the first day with a fair few stops along the way. While enjoying the incredible scenery, we got the whole team to Cape Conran in a pretty good time. |
Hey!I'm Bella. I'm a young writer, traveller and coffee lover, always keeping an eye out for the next adventure. Archives |
Photo used under Creative Commons from cattan2011