Ya Ling Caves (and how Bella ate her way through them..!)

Today we took a short journey to the Ya Ling Caves in the mountains about 35 minutes outside of Nanning City. It was a peaceful ride through the country, and got to see a lot of farm land, and incredible mountains (Zach took some great pictures...)....Before you go to the Caves, you visit a small recreated village, depicting how the farmers in this province live.....It was very interesting to show how simple they live, and what they need to do, utilizing primative tools, in order to survive....from there, you light 3 incense candles and place them at the foot of a large Buddah-like statue and say a little prayer, and bow three times....The caves were incredible......Polar Caves in NH got nothing on these....All of the guys on our trip (myself, Jim and John; and there is Carmen, a woman who is travelling all alone but has been doing great, and helps that she has a 21 month old that sleeps about 12 hours a day....no fussing, and is a joy); all tried out our Snugglis today.....Loaded with the children in front, we were ready to attack the caves.....Up and down rock stairs, it was about an hour walk through the limestone caves....throughout the tour, a guide will have lights shine on various formations in the caves, indicating what the locals had named them......such as limestone formations that resembled two men playing chess.....Dragons....Lions.......husband and wives....very interesting....Zach thoroughly enjoyed it, but kept trying to take pictures, in the dark.......Bella did fantastic for the first 2 thirds of the walk, content to be facing out of the Snuggli, taking everything in (wait to everyone meets here....VERY VERY nosy).....(side note to Jim, Tracy, Brittany and Spencer: we now know what you mean about the 'second child'......we think we got the female Spencer......very very active...!!!).....when the other children started dozing off, we thought it time to switch Bella around so she could lie on her stomach and nap......NOPE.......only thing that could quiet the shrills in the Cave was to keep a chip in her mouth at all times (smoky bacon Pringles seemed to do the trick).....when it got quiet, and the guide was about to point out an interesting formation, little Bella would let you know she's still there.....pop a chip in the mouth, buy yourself a few more minutes....like feeding the meter.....when we were approaching the last of the steps, heading up, is when she decided to doze off......Tina took her at this point, and we exited the Caves....They closed a gate behind us, and we all gathered to wait for the bus....it was then we noticed that we did not have our camera......Our guide was getting the van/bus, so we had to convey, in broken English, that they needed to open the gate for us to retrieve our Camera...they finally conceeded, and myself and another lady (who is travelling to assist her friends), ventured in.....mind you, during the tour, they have colored flourescent lights that light up now and then, or small lights mounted on the rocks.....at this point, all is turned off....they were kind enough to provide us with a small flashlight, and we fumbled up a few rock stairs, til we noticed a silver shiny object, that luckily was the camera........Zach was pleased, as he was the official photographer today...(all pictures that I post later are ones that Zach took himself, NO help whatsoever....).....Back to the hotel for some lunch, and relaxation....Bella is napping now, so Tina and Zach are taking a walk.........For those friends of Zach who are reading this (Evan....Jocelyn...Helen...Brittany...Spencer...Alex...Julia..Bryan and Matthew....Gerrianne...AJ...Nick and Alex......Mrs. Maguires class.......and anyone we may have missed), Zach wants to say hi and that he misses everyone.......This is a once and a life time trip, and we are blessed to be on this journey, and blessed with a very healthy.....very happy.......daughter......For those catching up on blog posts, I finally converted this to English, and noticed that I had one post (labelled GREAT WALL) as a draft, and not published.....So, I re posted it.......