Day 6
The bus departure was 7am to give us time to reach the third and final opening ceremony in Yixing. This was in a park with quite an impressive background to the stage - waterfalls and precisely cut bushes. There were speeches as with the previous two ceremonies, and then a race around the park. It turned out that the park was pretty large, with the longest course being 6k straight line. Most of the forested bits of the park were dark green so it was lots of path running, but we went into lots of interesting little areas and ran through some tea fields too.
Then it was off to our third hotel, imaginatively named “Best Hotel” although it was probably the least best of the three, still pretty good though! In the afternoon there was originally more training planned, but everybody had already run quite a lot so it was replaced by just exploring the village where the training was planned with a map. The beginner orienteers had someone experienced with them to practice following where they were on the map, and everybody else just walked with the map and took photos. After half an hour we were back on the coaches for a very quick visit to a bamboo forest national park. We were taken up a small but very well surfaced forest road in a convoy of buggies, had a short time to take photos, and then went back again.
We returned to the hotel and had free time for the evening, so naturally the choice was more karaoke. Oliver (the German leader, who can speak Chinese) organised a group of about 50 people to go down the road for this at about 8pm. People gradually went to bed but ACI were still well represented at half past midnight when we decided it was bed time!