Located in Zhejiang Province, southeast of the famous city of Nanjing, an ancient imperial city where even today you can admire its beauty and historic past, as well as the main city of Jiangsu Province (more specifically the eastern coast), Ningbo is one of the oldest cities in China and owns its fame mostly due to its port, which is among the most important and well-known.

In fact, after the First Opium War (1839-42), with a stipulation in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, it was listed among the five ports open to international commercial traffic. We also know that Ningbo has a history going back more than 2,000 years thanks to its frequent commercial exchanges along the Silk Road, which especially intensified during the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) Dynasties.

According to recent statistics, the city of Ningbo stands out as 16th place on the national classification of the best economic cities list of 2018, and at the same time, it’s considered one of the 30 cities that have the highest rate of innovation and creativity.

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Among my family and friends, I’m known as the adventurous one, and I usually tell my mother my crazy stories without her prior knowledge to save her from a heart attack. This was one of those times – when I went bungee jumping in China.

Adrenaline Junkies

Last June, my best friend and I were excited about summer in Shanghai. We were working as English teachers, and although we worked through the summer, we were looking forward to spending some weekends exploring nearby towns and hiking spots outside of Shanghai. There are a lot of tourism and adventure tourism companies that take trips on the weekends, everything from hiking in the desert to picking tea in Anhui.

There are a lot of tourism groups on WeChat, China’s most popular app for communicating, where they post monthly trips they were advertising. As I scrolled through the official accounts I follow I saw an offer for bungee jumping in Ningbo with a company called Wanna Travel, amongst the usual hiking and camping trips. I was immediately intrigued and read the description.

The group was doing a day trip to Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai driving for three hours, with a bungee jump in the morning and a barbeque on the beach in the afternoon. This was just the thing I needed to unwind from a long week and I texted my best friend immediately to see if she wanted to go. She said yes, and the next day we made the deposit securing our spots on the trip.

The day trip cost 800 Yuan, including transportation, the entrance to the park/bungee, barbeque and alcohol.
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