The trip to the countryside part one

 Last night, well I think it was last night, restaurant boss lady offered to take me for a walk in the countryside, adn as I am interested in getting off the beaten track I said I'd lie to go.  If at this point you are a regular reader of my blog, you maybe thinking "Wat is he up to with her? " ...or vice versa. I have started thnking that too!  However as far as I can gather, her husband works abroad and he does not find life easy there, so she has taken pity on me.  I am still a little suspicious because she is so friendly with the 'old foreigner', but as far as I can tell she is just freindly!
Anyway, the next day, I got a call "Come downstairs now...we are goiong to the countryside!".  Invitations in China are usually immediate, none of the planning and deliberation, and 'do I feel like it' that we have in England.  So downstairs I went.  We stopped at her restaurant and drank tea with several people.

This is a picture of the outside of her restaurant after we returned from the trip.  Many of the abundant plastic flowers had been ripped out, and the 'Astroturf' on the outer walls had been spruced up.

She walked off and a guy who I didn't know told me to come with him.  I went with him and another guy to her car and the journey started.  I imagined that we were goiong somewhere nearby, but I was very wrong.  We left town by the back road and I saw places I never even knew existed.  Thenthrough a mountain tunnel and through a few small villages.  We stopped at a shop.  Well as shops go this was basic.  Like many 'shops' in China, this was the ground floor room.  Concreted, unlit and open at the front.  One of the guys got out and bought some cigarettes and returned to the car, and off we went and turned left, off the main road and onto what soon would be a road but wasnt yet!

The road started off looking like a soon-to-be-built road, but as you can see from the video below, it soon changed!

There was obviously a road around here somewhere, but not sure where.  To my right I could see the 'pillars' of a new bridge in teh distance and in the foreground there wer stepped rice and crop fields.  However the car was bouncing so much I could barely hold my camera still!

Around me the conversation was becoming quite animate.  I waited for a gap and asked where we were going."To see the big geese!".  Mmm...was this a code word?  I was a little puzzled.  As the jouorney progressed puzzlement became mild anxiety.  I was in the middle of rural China, way off the beaten track with two unknown guys and a woman I really hardly knew and we were going to see the 'big geese'.   Their conversation continued to be animated and all I could pick up was the occasional 'pengyou' (freind).  After forty five minutes of this, my mind wandered.  Was I going to be taken to some triad organisation and sold as a sex-slave? Haha maybe that was more of a wish than a worry, but seriously I have read stories of foreigners trusting the worng person and disappearing.  I sized up the two guys in my mind.  Easy I could take them out if I need to and I dont think restaurant boss lady would put up much of a fight.  I made my plan.  Then I contacted Maria and another Chinese friend, told them not to worry, and kept sending them my GPS location...just in case!  Anyway, after an hour and a quarter we eventually stopped at a small building in the middle of nowhere.  There were a couple of dogs tied to trees nearby.  Mmm interesting!