March 30, 2026
A week after our return from Nepal, I went to our Grade 5 "Week Without Walls" at Pak Lap in Hong Kong with about 40 students and 5 other teachers. It took us about 4 hours to get there (not counting the time it took us all to cross the border) and involved 2 busses, a ferry, and a 15-minute walk.
Pak Lap is owned by the Utahloy Foundation, which also owns our school. It consists of a variety of modern dormitory buildings, a kitchen and eating area, a turf field, and a café on the beach. For many of these students, being away from home was a very big deal (although seasoned Utahloy students have been going to camp since grade 3). They did a variety of activities, including setting up tents on the turf field and sleeping out there for one night. We also went kayaking and coasteering. There was a short hike to a nearby lookout where groups of students were challenged with creating a shelter out of a tent fly and rope segments. Overall the camp went really well and I was glad to have taken part. Noémie and Kieran did well being left on their own for 4 days, despite a little "sleep-in" issue one morning...
The weekend after I returned we had an open-house at school ("Family Day") to celebrate the opening of our new dormitory at school called "Dragon House". There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a huge red ribbon and gold letters that said, "DRANGON HOUSE" and I don't think anyone saw the type-o until after all of the photos of the CEO and foundation owner proudly holding the ribbon were taken. After I had spent sufficient time there to say hello to various parents and students, I made my exit and went to a nearby car rental place to test out driving for the first time in China. It actually went quite well, and I learned that the driving here isn't terrible only due to incompetent drivers, but largely due to incompetent road-planning. The roads and exits do not always allow for enough space to change lanes before turns, and there is a LOT of U-turning going on. However, I managed to drive around on and off for 24 hours without scratching anyone or anything and I'm glad to have had the practice.
On Sunday morning I woke up early to drive around with less traffic and learn the ins and outs of toll roads, etc. Then I took Noémie and her friend Zayed out to Feifan Mountain Bike Park where Kieran was registered in his first Chinese mountain bike competition. It was really cool watching him fly down the mountain, and he was pleased that he placed 12th out of 61 riders in the U16 category.
It took me 3 tries to make the right-hand turn I needed (after having turned left and immediately needing to cross 3 lanes of traffic and a scooter lane during rush hour) to return the car, but I managed eventually.
School has been going relatively well, nothing major to report there.
On March 27th I was back at the airport and this time went to Bali for a conference called "The Big Gig" which is put on by Musical Futures International. I arrived in Bali on Thursday morning and had a day to wander around (rather exhausted after flying overnight) in the heat before checking into my hotel. It is very hot and humid here, but so nice to be in yet another new and beautiful location.
On Friday we had our first day of the conference which was a gamelan workshop held at the home of an ethno-musicologist from New Zealand who has a very impressive collection of Indonesian instruments and even more impressively has taught his sons to play them all and they help him run the workshop. Before I went I really had no idea what the gamelan even was, so it was really fun being able to hear and play all of the different instruments and rhythm patterns with music teachers from all over SE Asia and Oceania. We were given traditional sarongs to wear and served a lovely lunch, as well as taught a bit of a traditional Indonesian dance which was ridiculously complicated!
Up until Friday I had thought that a gamelan was an instrument. It is actually the playing of multiple instruments together. So we learned simple rhythm or melodic patterns and layered them on top of one another. It was both mesmerizing and very fun. It was somewhat stressful towards the end of the day when I received a message from my friend Blassy in Tanzania, who was slated to arrive in China for a visit on Thursday, and his flight (through the middle east) was cancelled. I managed to rebook it-- whew!
That evening I wandered around near my hotel, along the beach, and decided to have a cocktail at a roadside bar. While I was there, a message popped up from another music teacher in our chat forum asking if anyone wanted to go for a drink, so I told him where I was. Shortly afterwards there were four of us: he teaches in Hong Kong (but is South African), another teacher is from New Zealand, and then an American who teaches in Thailand joined us as well. It was such a nice break for me to be out on my own and socializing with like-minded people! On my way back to the hotel I stopped at a local spa for a massage and decided that Bali is a pretty cool place. :)
On Saturday we went to Dyatmika International School where the main workshop was being held. I was a bit apprehensive because I knew that there would be a heavy focus on pop and rock music, as well as music technology-- which is why I was there. I felt vastly underqualified. However, after the welcoming messages and traditional dancing was over and we were divided up into our first workshops, I absoloutely fell in love with everything we were doing. The first session leader put on a pop song that I did not know and asked us to try and pick out as many parts as we could. She then indicated around the room at the various instruments and said, "Everybody take an instrument! If you do not already play it, even better!"
I really thought she was kidding, so I turned to the guy next to me and said, "She didn't really mean that, did she? Because I really don't play the guitar" ... at which point, Anna, the session leader, overheard me and said, "I certainly did mean it!" and grabbed a guitar and put it in my hands. She then put one slide up on the screen in front of us which had some chord fingerings, a simple rhythm, some lyrics, and a starting note or something. We all stared at the screen and fumbled around with our instruments but within about 10 minutes we were all playing along and laughing. I remembered how much fun music is when you stop worrying so much about technique and concert-readiness. Each workshop was a bit of a take on that same idea: play, have fun, try new things, be less intimidated, etc. We wrote songs about rhinoceros romance and funky frogs, we re-created drumkits on chairs, we improvised sounds we heard on classroom instruments, and it really gave me the drive to try new things with my students.
On Saturday after the session I went for a quick swim at the beach with Georgina from Australia (but teaches in Thailand), and that night we all went out to a beautiful beach restaurant.
Sunday was more of the same-- I was having so much fun that I forgot I was in Bali and decided that this workshop could have been held anywhere and I'd want to be there.
On Sunday night I went out for pizza with Edward, an Aussie who has been living and teaching in Bali for 20 years. It was amazing how fast that trip was over.
April 12, 2026
I returned to Guangzhou on Monday and was pleased that Noémie and Kieran seemed to have done well at home on their own for a few days. Kieran had left for Grade 9 camp that morning, so he was off in Yunnan province hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge when I returned. Because he hates Chinese food so much, Noémie and I had made a plan to go out and try as much local street food as we could while he was away. Unfortunately, our first attempt at that was a dismal failure and neither of us could finish what we bought. We are still struggling to find food that we really enjoy here.
On Wednesday after school I went straight to the airport to pick up Blassy after his awful 30 hours of flying and transiting through Doha. But he made it! We had not seen each other in 7 years so it has been great catching up with him... and so strange to be doing so in China of all places! We met 28 years ago when he was our safari guide on our first-ever trip to Tanzania. He also was our guide when I returned for a visit with the kids in 2019-- so they've changed a lot since he last saw them, too.
I finished up the school week and left Blassy at home to recover from his flight and get a taste of China, and on Friday after school I picked up a car from the local rental agency and we were ready for our Chinese road trip! We went and picked Kieran up from the airport that night (that was an adventure of going to the wrong terminal and trying to find parking, etc...) and on Saturday we hit the road. Unfortunately, Noémie was so stressed out about all of the schoolwork that she had been given that she asked to stay home. So we had to leave her behind.
We first headed to Yangshuo, where the kids and I had gone in November. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that the Qingming festival, which was last weekend, is a major holiday here. What was meant to be a 5-hour drive became almost 9 hours of traffic. Yangshuo, which is normally a quiet, beautiful town surrounded by karst formations and rivers, was teeming with people in every direction. Lots of them dressed up in traditional costumes and filming everything. Fireworks were exploding day and night. Driving and parking was a nightmare, and although I did manage to get Kieran booked in for a morning of rock wall climbing, I did not manage to get a river raft for Blassy and me. Our next stop was nearby Guilin, which was more of the same. We did go check out a huge, fascinating cave though!
That evening we went to Elephant Trunk Hill and hiked until after dark, and wandered the streets admiring the food, colours, sights and sounds.
Our next stop was almost 7 hours further north in the water town of Fenghuang, also known as Ancient Phoenix City. It is a beautiful old village that has maintained it's traditional wooden stilt houses and various bridges along a river. We had a wonderful time exploring the labyrinth of streets and alleyways, despite still struggling to find food that we enjoyed. It's a really beautiful city.
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| Kieran pointed out that this ancient bronze statue is pointing right at KFC. So very China! From Fenghuang we drove up to Zhangjiajie, which was our main destination. We stayed at the base of Tianmen mountain in a rather strange hotel on the 17th (and 13th) floor of an apartment complex. It was very hard to find, especially because the map led me straight into a gigantic underground parking garage and we had no idea where to exit. When we did manage to find a way out, we were surrounded by multiple skyscrapers and pathways. It is hard to explain just how huge everything is here; and when one cannot read Mandarin it is extremely complex to figure things out. It was later afternoon by the time we were checked in, but we still had a good number of daylight hours left, so we decided to go up Tianmen Mountain. It was fantastic. Blassy got to ride in his first-ever cablecar, and then we took a crazy bus ride up the windiest snaking road I had every seen! Only then did we actually see what I had anticipated, and climbed the 1000 stairs to the giant hole in the mountain. Once up there, we took escalator after escalator (7 in total!) which were each about 100m long. That took us right up to the very top of the mountain, where there were multiple trails to explore.         By the time we had taken the escalators back down, it was dark and the main staircase to the "window" on the mountain was all lit up. We took a different cable car down which avoided the crazy bus ride. The following morning we took all of our stuff as we were switching hotels to be closer to Zhangjiajie National Park. We followed the GPS to a park entrance but discovered that we were in the wrong area. Fortunately we could switch our tickets and entered from the southern (rather than eastern) end. It was very foggy and misty, so we were a bit disappointed when we took the cablecar up our first peak and could literally see nothing. We knew that we were on top of a HUGE karst formation with fabulous views, but it looked like milk. We walked along glass cliffside walkways and couldn't see anything below our feet. It was a beautiful trail and we hiked a long way before opting to go down to the bottom and (hopefully) get below the clouds. That was quite a bit better; we hiked a 5-km trail called The Golden Whip and had some good views of the unique mountains and rivers that make up Zhangjiajie.       We decided that we had probably hiked about 15 km on that first day in the park, and although Kieran was still bouncing around, Blassy and I were more than happy to sit down in the car and find our hotel that night! We had a great place to stay but it was on a super narrow street so eventually we had to ask one of the hotel employees to come out and direct us to a parking spot. She ran out ahead of us and we drove after her. We found a decent-enough dinner, and were thrilled the next day that the sun was shining. The East gate is the main entrance to Zhangjiajie and we opted to take a cablecar up right away while the weather was good. The park maps and signage is extremely confusing, because the translations for each location are different depending on whether you read the signs, look online, or follow the paper maps. So a peak known as "Fairy Holding Flowers" may also be "Pretty Girl in Springtime" or "Child with Bouquet", and it did not seem to matter who we asked, we were always pointed randomly somewhere and were perpetually confused. The good news is that the views in almost every direction were stunning. We had another long day of walking, and saw the Hallelujah Mountains which were the inspiration for the scenery in the movie "Avatar".       |
Towards the end of the day the fog started blowing in again, but by then we were pretty tired and felt like we had really seen everything we wanted to.
On Thursday we hit the road again and had a long drive south, this time ending at Liangzhou underground river, where there is another magnificent cave. Unfortunately to enter it we had to join a Chinese tour group and of course we understood nothing, but the cave really was spectacular and absolutely huge. We walked for about half an hour before taking a boat back to the entrance. The walls and features were all lit up with colourful lights.
We found a fabulous hotel that night which was very Chinese and full of heavy, ornate furniture. The rooms were enormous and Kieran and I shared a 2-room suite which also had a big dining table and patio. It was a nice way to end our trip.
Yesterday we made our way back to Guangzhou, which was about 3 more hours of driving. We were having fun mocking the GPS voice, which has some strange translations that she repeated frequently. She would often say, "Prepare to land in an area of high stones", and it took us 2 days to figure out that when she said, "There is a series of sharp bumps ahead. Please slow down." that she actually meant "Sharp curves". She also was constantly telling me the speed limit and where there were cameras, but she would say, "Current speed is 100. The speed limit is 100. You are speeding. Please control your speed!" but if I went 97 she would say, "The speed limit is 100. Current speed is 97. Please maintain a faster speed. Choose a straight lane". There was no pleasing the GPS.
Once we had made it back to our apartment, Blassy and I returned the car and then went to the clothing market so that he could get some new clothes. That was an adventure of working our way through various stalls of all sorts of eclectic styles and piles of textiles through neon-lit corridors. It was teeming with Africans so Blassy challenged me to spot the Swahilis and I don't think I was very good at it. Most people were from West Africa. Anyway, he got some new clothes and was happy.
This install is far too long again so I'll end it here. School starts again tomorrow and we're on the final leg of our first year in China! Blassy returns to Tanzania (hopefully his flight will not be cancelled) on Thursday.
:)
Shannon
