Beginning of the most awesome trip: In China, there's a long holiday in the autumn called The Golden Week. This year, there was two national holidays during the week. First was the Mid-Autumn Festival. It's a long tradition, and basically people celebrate the harvest during the 9th full moon in the Moon calendar. According to the legend, Chang'e, the Moon Goddess of Immortality lives on the moon, and during the 9th moon she is the nearest to her lover on earth and they can meet at last. There are many variations of the legend, you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival. Due to facts and fiction, Mid-Autumn Festival has been traditionally a family holiday, when you eat moon cakes and have some delicacies with your most beloved ones. The second holiday was the National Day on the first of October.

We had big plans for the week. First we were trying to get to beautiful Guilin and Yangshuo, but because of the holidays there are lots of people on the move. Our Chinese friends tried to book hotels and trains but it was useless, because the destination is too popular among the domestic travellers. Then our other Chinese friends invited us to their home island, Shang Chuan Dao. We hassled with the destinations and with too many Chinese trying to arrange things at the same time, it was exhausting. The Chinese found the arranging little too hard so they dropped out kindly. Afterwards, it was a lot easier to arrange the hostels, hotels and train tickets by ourselves.
Be careful with the Chinese people. If they don't know something, they prefer silence or even lying before losing their dignity, or "face". And some people may seem very helpful and nice at first, but in real life they have their own goals. For example, hanging out and talking English with foreigners is highly valued by other Chinese students, so some Chinese will do anything to achieve that kind of social Kudos. Unfortunately, they often forget to tell their true intensions. We lost the best train tickets because some Chinese students wanted to exercise their English talents, rather than truly help us. Our advice is to think critically and choose your friends wisely.

So our plan was to go to the Shang Chuan Island for the first two days, then travel by train to Hunan province for the rest of the vacation. We prepared the first day of the vacation, and bought some useful stuff like leather straps, camera cleaning equipment,
baby carrying backpack, LED torches and so on. And lots and lots of tissue paper. In the Sunday morning the Chinese friends, who invited us to their island, came to pick us up. We sat and chatted few hours in the car. Luckily there was almost no traffic, at least on the Chinese scale: http://www.businessinsider.com/golden-week-huge-traffic-james-in-china-2012-9. The boat trip took 30 minutes, and wasn't that exciting. Our first destination was to go on a beach, and what a surprise it was!

In China everything is very controlled and strict. It was the same on the beach: lifeguards everywhere and you needed to use a life-jacket to get to the waves. But after the shock it was fun, fun and fun. After a delicious meal we had moon cakes and enjoyed the little village at the island. In the evening our friends taught us some Chinese drinking habits and games, Kampei!
We spent the second day at another beach on the main land. Its attraction is that the sand in there is black. This beach was much more crowded. The amount of people is vast! Upside was that there were no lifejackets, but that much more lifeguards. The downside: overbooked during national holidays and too few garbage pins. There where most people were camping was so much waste in the sand so it was impossible for our daughter to play in there without shoveling cigarette buds etc. Therefore we walked quite a way to the other end of the beach where it was silent and cleaner.
For westerners these tourist attractions can be quite exhausting 'cause every other Chinese wants to take a picture with you or bring their children to play with your child. When it feels you no longer can tolerate the tourists around you, you can always politely walk away and tell them you don't want them to have your or your child's picture. Amelia learned very fast how to refuse from people taking pictures of her; she also learned it in Chinese!