Apr 16, Thursday, Jinghong

It was much hotter today, well into the ninety’s with humidity in the 70’s.  Good thing we aren’t doing heavy hiking. 

We drove an hour out of town to the Wild Elephant Valley Park...

and took a long gondola ride up over a couple of mountains and into the main part of the park.  

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any wild elephants.  Billie said that in the 6 years he has been leading tours into the park he has seen elephants only twice.  We did think we heard some though.  There are only about 60 wild elephants in all of China and they are all in the park.

After getting back from the ride we walked briefly through the aviary but passed on the parrot show as we have seen them before.  

We then went to the butterfly house where there were lots of flowers and lots of butterflies.  They actually landed on the flowers to feed long enough to get some pictures.

There were some lovely gardens with a lily pond.

There was also an elephant show doing basically a normal circus elephant act.

After lunch we drove back to Jinghong to see the Great Buddha Temple that was built in Thai architecture. Much of the building was covered in gold gilt (maybe fake but the building was beautiful).  

From the temple grounds we walked into the Man Ting Park.  This park belonged to the Dai royal family from the 1100’s until Mao seized it in the 1950’s. 

We saw peacocks sitting in a tree.

Some interesting buildings.

And a lovely lake with bridges and pagodas.

It was a lovely park and walk but too hot to really enjoy it.