China Trips: Four Days in Yunnan (Grade 11)

Yunnan – a popular destination for foreign tourists because of its snow-capped mountains, rice terraces, and deep gorges. If you wish for an authentic Chinese experience, Yunnan is the place to go. This year, the juniors embarked on a brand new Dragonfly program – four days in Lijiang and Shaxi.

The students were required to be at the Ersha campus at 6:30. However, once they reached the airport, their anticipation overpowered the fact that some students only had four hours of sleep the night before. They participated in a ‘Great Race’ in Lijiang Old Town, where they were required to complete tasks while navigating the maze-like streets and alleys. Then the three groups split up and followed their own schedule. Each group went hiking and biking through the various villages in Shaxi, had traditional dance lessons, took part in corn farming, and visited a local kindergarten where the students had the opportunity to interact and play games with local children.

For Katherine Hsu, hiking was the best activity in the whole trip because “even though the hike was very tiring, the view was gorgeous and I had never seen anything like that before.” Following hiking the next favorite was biking. Ibrahim Bah says that the “downhills and uphills in the route were very exciting”. For other students, Jiwon Lee and Jeremy Park who preferred more downtime thought that the “hotel rooms were really nice, and the beds were nice, compared to last year when we had to stay in tents for two nights.”

Like any other China Trips, the trip came with several challenges. A lot of students struggled in particular during the dance lessons they received from the ladies of the Naxi ethnicity. “The traditional dancing looked very simple when the ladies showed it to us, but when they broke it down it was really tough, and the music was very fast.” For students on the cross-country team, there was a morning run every day at six o’ clock, which cross-country members Jiwon Lee and Ibrahim Bah felt was the hardest part.

The unexpected part of this trip was the food – students had low expectations, thinking that it would be worse than school food. However, each meal turned out to be better than the next. A particular favourite was the vegetarian meal at the temple they visited. There was traditional Yunnan food as well as the student favorites of eggs and tomato, vegetable soup, and minced pork with vegetables.

When asked what they learned about themselves during this trip, most of the students said that they needed to work on their fitness, since most of the activities made them feel out of shape. Despite their exhaustion, all of the students stated that they would recommend this trip to next year’s Grade 11.