Hello reader,
I’m just starting to get into the net sphere and whilst I’ve had a newsletter for some time writing has been very sporadic so I thought it would be useful to keep visitors to our web pages updated via shorter and less formal updates posted here.
It seems that we go from day to day with nothing particularly interesting happening so I hesitate to fill readers in with rather boring activities but we have been busy over the past few months so here goes..
As some of you will already know we produce our frozen peeled chestnuts in China. Each year we send fresh Australian chestnuts to China for peeling and freezing. This is done very quickly – actually within weeks of harvest, as we airfreight the nuts to China. Brian travels to China to supervise peeling and make sure the nuts are handled with care throughout processsing. This year we updated our packaging and changed the shape of the cartons so that they fit more efficiently onto a pallet. Because of this, Brian returned to Australia immediately after processing (before final packing) and then we both travelled to China to complete processing in July.
I had not been to China personally for three years so it was good to go back and visit the factory and managers, many of whom I have know for more than ten years. One of the things I have previously regreted about our visits to China is that it is always for work and we have done very little sightseeing over the years. China is an interesting culture full of history and we feel that we want to learn and understand more about the country out of respect for the Chinese company that we work with. So while we were there we took the weekend off and went to visit the Great Wall of China. We did a six hour hike to a part of the wall which was around two hours by car from Beijing and mostly unrestored. Our guide filled us full of information about the how, why and when the wall was built as well as lots of other snippets of interesting facts.
Unbelievably one of the first things we came across on our walk was a chestnut tree!
It was a difficult walk with many very high steps and rough ground. It seemed we were either going up or down and you had to be very sure-footed and concentrate. The weather was hot and we realised we were not as fit as we thought but our guide was patient and waited for us while we gasped and consumed copious amounts of water. It’s an amazing stucture and much bigger than I expected. In spite of the heat and our tired feet, it was a great experience.
