Day 1
It was a 7am start for breakfast. There was a huge variety of things on offer with both western and Chinese options available. We then drove about two hours to a forest. Parts of the forest were nice and parts had rather a lot of vegetation. It was raining but sitll warm. There were also fequent rumbling noises nearby, which turned out to be neither thunder nor a quarry, but the army doing explosive drills. Once almost everybody was back, Ben was sent on a 7.5k control collection, but one Croatian was still left in the forest when he returned. He wasn’t new to orienteering, but it turned out that he’d got lost, tried to ask a local woman for help, but she thought he wanted to steal her chickens so she chased him away with a stick. He made it back to the start shortly afterwards though so all fine. Lunch was replaced by a KFC delivery to save some time, before we drove back to Nanjing to walk up the Purple Mountain. It was an easy walk up a paved road, but unfortunately there were no views because it was quite foggy. Dinner was our first taste of Chinese dining - sitting at round tables with a wide variety dishes (some nice, some not so nice) in the middle on a part which spins. After dinner we went to a different part of Nanjing where there was a famous old shopping street, where ACI (the Anglo-Celtic Isles) succeeded in obtaining a speaker to supply bus tunes, but failed in bargaining for it. We then headed back to the hotel and went pretty much straight to bed.