Crouching Tiger, Hidden Huang Long Xi!!!

Just like the Wild West photos back home!

While we were in Australia we purchased another travel book on China called The Rough Guide to China. We can highly recommend these books to anyone who loves to travel a little off the beaten track. In the book they had the top 40 "must see" places in China. We were very surprised to see a place called Huang Long Xi, which is a small village 40 km south of Chengdu. I was very excited to see this place because it is where they filmed the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", which is one of my favorite movies.

We headed out Saturday afternoon with 3 van loads of people to check out this town. It was a quaint village with lots of little shops, women selling crowns of flowers, and people lined up on the street selling vegetables. Of course as usual there were women sitting everywhere knitting.



Here is Sadie checking out this woman's sweater pattern.



Us with the Hardgroves!



Gemma and I even went on a horse ride along the river.

We also had the pleasure of playing dress up, something that Jonny really enjoyed because he tried on about 5 different outfits.



Here is Gemma dressed as a Chinese Princess. Here Chinese name is Xiao Gong Zhu, which means "Little Princess".





Traci, Michael, and Jen. Michael and Jen work with Jonny and Traci is Michael's wife.



Doesn't Jonny look Chinese???



Another family photo!

Here are some photos of the various temples we visited while we were there. Unfortunately they didn't have signs up to say exactly where the movie was filmed but I am pretty sure it was here:






The next few photos are from Gulong Si Temple.









This was a beautiful spot to visit and give you a taste of the Qing Dynasty, which was between 1644 and 1911. We hope to visit again when we start getting visitors! (hint, hint ;)