For the Chinese National Day holiday week we've been staying at Moganshan, a beautiful bamboo-forested mountain. We are only three hours from Shanghai but it feels like an entirely different world here. The air is clean; we can see stars at night; the local people are exceptionally kind and friendly.

They are also collectively very used to foreigners here. Moganshan is where in the early 1900s, well-heeled Shanghai expats built stone villas to escape Shanghai’s swampy summer heat. They abandoned the villas during the war, and weren’t able to return after the revolution. The villas fell into disrepair and the mountain people returned to their original farming pursuits.

On this trip we are sharing a modernized farmhouse with another family we know from Shanghai. It’s halfway up a steep hill. To get to the hotel office is about a 10-minute hike down narrow stone and mossy pathways. In the other direction, about half an hour uphill, is the tiny town of Moganshan itself. The Lodge in Moganshan is a lovely café run by Mark Kitto, an entrepreneur in Shanghai in the 1990s who started the profitable magazines That’s Shanghai, That’s Beijing, etc. While exploring around Hangzhou, Kitto literally stumbled on Moganshan and was the first modern day expat to rent a shell of an old villa and to rebuild it into a weekend house.

Kitto later lost nearly everything when a deal gone wrong led a government publishing agency to seize his businesses. Rather than leaving China as many expected him to, he and his family retreated to Moganshan and opened their café, which has become a hub for a revitalized Moganshan. He tells this story in his book China Cuckoo. James and I both read the book before coming up here and have enjoyed meeting some of the characters out of the book – including Kitto himself and Ma Ayi, whose family first took care of him here.

Since this is our first trip to Moganshan, we decided to stay at the one resort most expats in Shanghai have heard of, a place called Naked Retreats. Despite the name, it is NOT a nudist resort. As far as I can tell they mean "naked" in the sense of simple, fancy-free, and eco-friendly.

But eco-friendly only goes so far in China. James appears here as a guest blogger to tell the story of our first evening here:

“When we checked in, we were told that our house had its own fire pit in the backyard, and that we were welcome to make a fire. After dinner, I went outside with a lantern to look for firewood and kindling. One of the ayis saw me, figured out what I was trying to do, and took charge. From somewhere she produced an armful of wood shavings, a pile of bamboo, and a basket of perfectly seasoned firewood. Gratefully I watched her pile up the shavings, then arrange the bamboo and firewood around it in a perfect cone. Finally, she pulled out a lighter and ignited the shavings. The shavings caught right away, but burned out quickly before the firewood had a chance to catch. I thought to myself, ‘ah, now let’s see how a true mountain person fixes it… Will she blow on it? Add more shavings? Rearrange the wood?’ Instead she grabbed a plastic jug of kerosene, and before I could stop her, poured it on the fire. It erupted into a huge, roaring and snapping conflagration. With a satisfied look on her face, she rocked back on her heels, nodded happily, and turned back to the house. Mission accomplished.”

We’ve really enjoyed these evenings around the fire, though sadly, since we finished the marshmallows last night, there are now N’more S’mores. We’ve also enjoyed a fishing trip with the kids, hiking through the bamboo forest, and picking our own tea leaves on a local plantation.

This afternoon James and the kids planned and shot a short martial arts film – “Crouching Koala, Hidden Bear” – which James plans to post on YouTube soon. I appear in it as both the minister and the bandits’ cook. Despite many rehearsals, there were two minor injuries during the filming. If you watch the slo-mo fight scene carefully, you can see that Emi smacks each of the boys on the head in turn with her wooden “staff.” She herself emerged unscathed. For tomorrow morning we have no plans yet. There’s no real need to go anywhere or do anything. A true holiday.