By Huang Zhiling (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-02-21 09:28

What makes it unique is the cluster of tens of thousands of egrets.

Each year, the egrets arrive on the morning of March 8 and leave on the fifth morning after the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. According to local chronicles, the phenomenon has lasted several hundred years and nobody knows why.

As dusk fell, we had dinner in a small restaurant in the Bamboo Sea. It was a banquet of bamboo - our palates were treated to six distinctive dishes, including cold bamboo shoot slices in sauce, roasted bitter bamboo shoots and rice cooked in bamboo. The meal cost the five of us about 150 yuan ($20).

As we had never eaten so much bamboo at one sitting, we joked that we had become like giant pandas.

Fully satiated, we were put up for the night in the Bamboo Sea Hotel and fell asleep immediately as it was so quiet.

Waking up early the next morning, almost all of us said it was the best sleep we had ever had.

Before leaving the Bamboo Sea, we visited the Bamboo Sea Museum.

The 0.7-hectare museum displays all the 58 bamboo species of the Bamboo Sea and ancient bamboo utensils and handicrafts. About 10,000 bamboo trees introduced from different parts of the country grow at the museum.

(China Daily 02/21/2008 page19)

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