Mount Emei
Trip Start
Jul 21, 2008
1
16
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Emeishan,
Sichuan,
China
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Above the clouds
. It was a really nice place, the owner spent 10 minutes showing us photos of the place from years gone by when it was just a shanty town looking cafe, but fair play, he's done well for himself as this hostel had 3 floors of various dormitory rooms etc. It only cost us 35 each to stay the night so about £5, and that included air conditioning...which is a must! The next morning we decide to start our hike of Mt Emei. with a map in hand, we were within stone throw of the entrance of the park.....so no getting lost then? Wrong..... the map from the hostel gave no real indication that the entrance to the park was behind some crappy looking shops, up a bit, then left, then right, then pay! Oh no! we walked for an hour and a half through forestry to some random temples in the trees that you had to pay to go in! Outside of one of these temples, we point to the chinese name on the map and ask which way to get to where we wanted to go. So this man spools off a lot of chinese and points in 3 different directions.....??......so again we pointed to the map and got the same response....... boo hoo hoo!!
Anyway, turns out that a lad near us was taking his grandparents in the general direction and that he would show us where to go (and all this information is passed on through the Chinese language
long way up
! we must be amazing to understand it!). Sure enough we are taken to the entrance of the park, which really is behind a load of shops and cafes. We really wished we'd bought a proper map for 24 pence at the start....but we are too tight with our money!When we got to the entrance, it's £24 to get in......so another heart attack as it's just way too much money! But we'd just spent the last 2 hours trying to find the entrance, so we weren't backing out now! At the hostel, fellow travelers write messages on the wall, and one common theme that cropped up was the endless amount of steps. The steps were designed for chinese feet, so if you had a shoe size greater than 3, three quarters of your foot couldn't get on the step! After about 3 hours of walking on our own and occasionally seeing the odd chinese tourist, we caught up with 2 men from London, whom we ended up walking the rest of the day with. We got to the section of path where monkeys hung about. This area was full of tourists that had caught the bus to the nearest stop. The monkeys are known to be quite aggressive, so there were men in suits keeping an eye on the monkeys, and had canes to scare them back if they got too cosy with the people. The Irish man we were walking with had bought monkey peanuts at a stall and fed a monkey from it's hand, but we quickly declined as it was just too risky
Monestary
!We spent our first night in a monastry that was absolutly beautiful and creaked whenever you walked on the floor boards. It was just great. After a lot of arguing with a man on the desk about whether or not we could have the cheapest room (he just kept saying, in chinese, that he didnt have this type of room even though it was plainly advertised on the wall!) We walk up the stairs, past the huge buddhist praying room, with gold statues surrounding the outskirts of the wall, to our little dormatory room, which was really cosy. Throughout the evening you could hear wild monkeys fighting in the trees.
That night we decided to walk down 2 long flights of stairs to a little food stall we had passed on the way up. It was run by a crazy chinese lady called Betty. We had dinner wiith the 2 men from London, and just had a good evening sitting on a table that was on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by a dense forest with monkeys squealing in the background. As we decide to leave the 'cafe', Betty is saying for us to take a torch to light our way up the stairs, but as true Brits, we declined and said that we would be fine
Monkey
. Of course, by this time it's pitch black outside, and we have the most laughter trying to climb up about 100 steps, you just couldn't see anything. When we got back to the monastry, we stumble across a ping pong table that the monks use in their spare time. So for the next hour the 4 of us play ping pong, but using our own rules, as it's too difficult to play otherwise!The next day,after filling our tummies with fried rice, fried noodles and pork(.......where's the toast with peanut butter?) We set off for the next leg of the journey. On the first day we had walked up 17km worth of steps, non stop steps! and today, we have 22km to walk up to the very summit.We had set off with our 2 London companions, but they had only this one day to get to the top, so they soon zoomed off as Helen was flagging only an hour into our second day. About 4 hours into walking, we came across the really true wild monkeys sitting in trees, and 2 were sitting on the path up ahead grooming each other. We soon spot about 4 big babies playing in the trees, so Merlin starts to film them. As Merlin is filming, Helen notices one of the big daddy monkeys starts to climb through the branches and casually make it's way over to us. Then out of nowhere, this big monkey jumps and grabs Merlins hips (There's muddy handprints for proof!) and tries to get into our bag for food
Monkey part 1
. Merlin screamed like a girl,it was so funny. We tried to beat the monkey back by banging our walking canes on the floor next to it, but the monkey just grabbed Merlins cane and held it, true Kung fu monkey style! After showing us a lot of teeth and screaming at us,it soon walked away back to it's tree. It was so frightning!So we keep on walking,very very slowly, as the muscles in the legs are really burning, only to stumble on part of the course where they were putting in new steps and barriers. You start to see men carrying absolutly insane amounts of weight on their backs, be it 2 bags of 25kg cement, slabs of stone etc, it is insane when you see how steep these steps are. we worked out that they only get paid depending on how much weight they carry,so some men had boxes of water and juice at about 60kg. We were struggling carrying our small bags with a bottle of water in on our backs, but some men were offering the service of carrying you up. They had 2 bamboo canes with a seat in between them, and 2 men would carry you up.These men were very often in their late 50's maybe 60 years old. You would often see them carrying these perfectly capable people who can walk, and these men who are absolutly exhausted have no water on them as they cannot afford it. It's a side of China that you don't get to see, but there is so many people right at the bottom of the scale that do this sort of job for hardly no money at all
monkey part 2 (when monkeys turn bad)
. It's really sad to see.After 9 hours of walking up steps, we eventually find ourselves above the clouds! It was amazing. We caught a cable car to the top, which was just brilliant. It cost £3.60 each and went really fast through the mist and then, boom!, out the other side of the clouds where the sun was shining and you were truly on top of the world. Just a sea of thick fluffy clouds all around us. We spent the next hour trying to get into a hotel room, haggling with the price, and when they wouldn't budge on the price we would walk to the next hotel. We eventually stayed in a hotel right on the summit for £10 for both of us which was a good price considering the location! On the summit there were many monks, a monastry,and a gigantic shrine! How they got the materials up there to buid this thing, I dread to think!
The next morning we wake at 6am to see the sunrise above the clouds. We stand there for about an hour, when we finally got our first glimpse of the red sun appearing from beneath the clouds. All the chinese go mad, like they have never seen the sun before and start going 'woooowww!', 'wwwwwww' and so on! Then they all start doing silly things like cupping the sun, once one does it they ALL do it
Monument at 6am
. But then we saw a man trying to bite the sun for a photo, So we spend the next 10 minutes trying to do the same! Silly tourists. On the way back to the hotel,after seeing the sunrise, Merlin starts chatting to 2 Israeli people who we find out are going down the mountain today. Helen had woken with a bad stomach again, and had bad knees and wasn't sure if she could make the 38.5km hike down in one day. So Merlin teamed up with the couple from Israel and started to make their way down the mountain, whilst Helen took the 2 hour bus journey down to the bottom!.After saying goodbye to Helen, we set of at a good pace bouncing down the steep stairs and making the most of the early morning cool weather, the views were amazing even though we had seen them the day before. It only took maybe 3 hours before we got to the split in the pathway to go back down another direction, as we decended into new territory we all knew that this way down was supposed to be very easy as every one recomends going this way up if you are short on time. But my god it was the steepest we had seen, it didn't get easier, it just kept on going. We met some people who were really struggling,we didnt have the heart to tell them that it just keeps going.
We got to our first snack shack and have a early lunch consisting of apples, pears, savory biscuits and some very funny looking thick yellow bread which was delicious
sculptures in th cliff faces
. When we left the snack shack the cloulds parted just enough for us to see this beautiful mountain, I jokingly said " you know we have to walk down this one then up that one then back down it" Bloody hell I was right, I didnt mind walking up the stairs that zig zaged back and forth, but when you are confronted with a staircase that is in a straight line and disapears into the clouds it really makes you wonder why they didnt go around the Bloody mountain!We reach "Wanaian Temple" which was a huge boost for us as we knew that we were really close to the bottom ( 2.5hrs away) so we decided to stop for some noodles, this is where i finally have my first dose of real sichuan food, I was not disappointed my lips were on fire, as was my tounge and the inside of my cheeks! but we couldn't let it show as the 3 ladies who served us all watched to see if we could handle the food, as we sat there with sweat running down our faces ( from the food not the walk ) we finish off our noodles and in an act of sheer stupitity i decide it woud be a good idea to drink the rest of my noodle soup, now i didnt look so cool as I was left coughing and spluttering much to the amusment of the 3 ladies !! boy was that HOT.
We set off for the final part, and it was so amazing there was a river that was as clear as tap water running through a gorge with rope bridges crossing back and forth,as we walked around a corner there was a lake with some of the most amazing colours and more wild life here than we had seen over the past 2 days
Statue
. We saw dragon flies, koi carp, funny little creatures at the bottom of the lake, birds with amazing colours, huge colourfull butterflies and a crab! weird.We decided to catch a bus back for the final 10 kilometers as we did not fancy walking up another 900meters just to go down again. we celebrated our descent with a magnum ice cream yummy yummy.
All in all, a fantastic 3 days and some of the most amazing scenery we have ever seen, i really hope that some of the pictures that we put on will help you to imagine what it is like, this was by far the best way to spend our final days in china, now for Singapore...... and the Grand Prix!
