Emeishan Shenlong Grand Hotel

... passer a cote de cette traque, et c'est la croisee des chemins. Nous nous souhaitons bonne chance et je pars avec Christiane rejoindre Robert, le Hollandais, a la station d'autobus. Encore un bon jack. Nous trouvons l'autobus se dirigeant vers la ville de Emei. Ces moyennement longs voyages d'autobus sont tout de meme salement interessant, passant une multitudes de villages miniatures, de champ, de forets, et lorsque l'envie de siester se fait sentir, les sieges s ...

... route on the way down.

Amazing. I just stopped walking and looked around and listened. A foggy mist loomed in the air. Monkeys swung from the trees. Thousand some-odd foot cliff on either side of the gorge we were in had waterfalls every few hundred yards, cascading down the cliff face into a cascading stream below. Birds communicating. Plant life ...

... could just imagine what would happen to my backpack and to my money that was in the bag. So, I decided to wait for people coming my way so I could join them. I waited about one hour until a couple came who were already informed by people who passed me going up the trail that a foreigner is waiting to join them. We all had bamboo sticks and got some rocks and were ready to face the monkeys. The girl gave me a lesson as to what not to do, such as screaming and ...

... being carried. Sometimes there were big fat guys plus their backpacks, perhaps more than 100kg being carried up or down these steep winding steps.

The recommended time is three days up and two days down. But Carl and I got ourselves a bit stuck and made the trip in a day and a half up and a day and a half down.

There were plenty of very large and naughty monkeys who tried to steal our backpacks.

Rano nas probral budicek telefonem v 4.54. Sesli jsme do restaurace na snidani, ktera kvalitou smele soutezila s predeslou veceri. Cinske damicky z Pekingu se toho opet temer nedotkly - ryzovy vyvar, suche kedlicky, vejce a neco smazene zeleniny.

Tentokrat se nam podarilo v autobuse lepe dohodnout s pruvodci. Dostali jsme cas, kdy mame byt odpoledne na nadrazi ve meste pod horou. Podepsali jsme papir v cinstine, ktery asi znamenal, ze kdyz na miste zahyneme, nikdo za ...

... for most of the journey- it seems westerners rarely use Chinese buses. After two hours of king-fu movies being played on the coach's TV screen (and getting rather worried when the driver multi-tasked by shaving his head while driving), the coach pulled into Baoguo station. We dumped our bags in the Teddy Bear Hostel so that we could travel lighter with just our day sacks. Off we went to climb to the summit of Emei Shan.

A large ...

... was the same old really, just chilling in the hostels bar. Met a familiar face, Simon Dalais is still staying there. He lost his teaching job and so is now staying in Chengdu to job hunt. The next day we just wasted by wandering around the city trying to decide what to do and what to see. We headed into the city center and sat in starbucks for a while and I bought a CK t-shirt from a random shop in the expensive district, by all the Gucci and Burberry HQ ...

... shot rocks. It felt like the humans were in the zoo and the moneys were having fun with us for a change. The entrance and exit had a "Monkey Injury Emergency Station" for obvious reasons. Take our advice buy the 1Y bamboo stick and save yourself from being scratched, bitten, or possibly disemboweled by a monkey. The next day we took a bus to the end of the road, and then a gondola to the very top of Mt. Emie, called the ...

... path and headed deep into the metropark type woods to a female monastery. Even though there were still stands selling merchandise, it felt a little more remote and peaceful. We headed back to the hotel and ate a nice dinner, though it may have been a little too exotic for my tastes. The full fish complete with eyes that one of my table mates decided to consume pretty much put me off from eating that night. After dinner I was super psyched for the spa. I put on my bathing ...

... to get up to the monostary, via a half haerted attempt to get us to stay at hotel on the way there. Once there we wandered aimlessly about trying to find someone to help us. Eventually found a nun who booked us in and showed us our room which was very nice for the princely sum of 160RMB! There were hot showers but we couldn't get any food, neither was it quiet people kept walking past our window and peering in saying "hello" .