Started out the other morning to hike Mt. Emei Shan- one of China's holiest Buddhist mountains. It's about 10,000 ft and a 52k climb. Emei town, at the base of the mountain, is your standard tourist town full of little restaurants and trinket shops and has a lot more fake waterfalls and Christmas lights than most holy sites I've been to in the world. Anyway, first order of business was trying to find the trail head, a task that was not so east given that topographical maps are illegal in China and so the map we had to use- a hand drawn cartoon-like thing that looked like it belonged in the front of a children's fantasynovel and would be better suited to locating the Pevensies in Narnia or tracking Frodo's progress across Middle Earth than it would be for staying on course for a 52k mountain climbing excursion. The names listed on the map- joking monkey tollgate and elephant wading pool (see picture attached) only furthered the sense of the fantastical. But a few hours of searching and we found the correct trail in off to a somewhat late start.
Thousands of years of history and thousands of climbers a year mean that someone, sometime along the way had decided to make the trails all stone steps-which made it interesting to be climbing a mountain by stairs. Ben was helpfully calculating thenumber of empire state buildings we were ascending and descending as we progressed. The mountain is also dotted with temples and pagodas - 72 to be exact, and we were planning on staying in monasteries on the way up. All the monasteries and stone paths created the feeling of being on an Indianna Jones movie set- no not in an Indianna Jones like setting, but set- like. A thin veneer of touristy artifice continued to pervade the whole mountain. But it was beautiful and realtively unspoiled, crews were picking up litter as fast as the Chinese tourists could drop it, and we saw some amazing flora and fauna- we hiked past tea trees, bamboo groves, rhododendron hedges and different biomes the higher we got. Multicolored butterflies floated past and we stepped over weird leaf like slugs
in what was really a rain or cloud forest, though mercifully no rain. And then of course, monkeys- the other fauna.
We approached the so-called joking monkey toll zone, (Tibetan Macaques, technically) so named because its swarming with monkeys (and Chinese tourists), and the monkeys block your path and you have to give them something to get past. For the most part though, they were fat, lazy and sated by the tourists feeding them, so we got our pictures (you can get right up next to them), and progressed onward and upward, away from the monkeys and away from the tourist hordes. Upward we went- the ascent getting more intense, with regular 500 stair ascents with no landings and a few monkeys here and there, or the occasional snack stand offering water, red bull, tomatoes, cucumbers and all manner of fungus. Finally we came to a flattersection, and a monkey stopped in the path in front of me. I rapped my monkey stick on the ground (my bamboo hiking pole that we'd taking to calling our "Hellz Wind Staffs." Nothing, he just stared back at me. "Hey Ben, check out how fearless these monkeys are!" I shouted up, and looked back down he was gone. Suddenly, a weight on my back. Shit. I turned and could barely make out a furball on my backpack. "AAAAGH!" I started spinning backwards in circles, frantically (and very, very awkwardly) swatting at my pack with my bamboo stick. It was all rather slapstick and I must have looked like Chevy Chase in Chinese Vacation if there were such a thing, though I was also having a hard time standing up- not just off balance from the monkey on my back but laughing so hard at the absurdity of it and how I must have looked. He didnt let go either- not until he'd gotten into the backpack and extracted my bag of peanuts I'd been saving for later did he leap off. He stood there staring at me, peanuts in hand. I took a step forward, he bared his teeth and hugged the peanuts closer. I attempted to bare my teeth back, but even though I never had braces, my teeth are not very scary. Okay my simian friend, you've won this round fair and square. Besides, the peanuts here are stale and always dusted with MSG. (as it everything- yes, thats the secret to Szechuan cooking- and they even give you a dish of it with your meal to season your food a little more should you so desire.)
Monkey episode behind us, we pushed onward, on the lookout now for monkeys and food more securely stored in our packs. The fog was coming in thick, and I could barely see Ben ten paces ahead. We found the next monastery by literally walking into it- and it was quite beautiful and dramatic in the fog, the sound of gongs and sweet smell of incense that we couldnt see, pagoda roofs sliding in and out of the fog... very cinematic. We rested for a while but a good sized tour group came up behind us, and we decided to press on to Yuxian, the next monastery seven or eight kilometers up the path.
An hour or so later we arrived at the dramatic clifftop Yuxian temple, where we checked in with a grumpy young monk who kept a slingshot for monkeys tucked into his robe, and mostly sat around smoking cigarettes and watching kung fu movies. (educational movies perhaps? After all, Emei Shan is purportedly where the Shaolin martial arts style originated. And by the way, there is ALWAYS a kung movie drama on TV here!). The views were dramatic, and this place too was literally crawling with monkeys and monkey families, dozens probably that would keep running into the temple, the kitchen, the hallways, and were admittedly quite cute in spite of my newfound monkey paranoia.
A decent night's sleep and an extremely bland monastic breakfast and we were up early for more insane stair ascents through the fog in the quiet of the morning and up to the elephant bathing pool temple, where we paused and looked out over the other mountains- the other temple-topped peaks poked out of the fog like islands floating in the clouds, a really incredible sight like out of an old Asian painting. We paused for some pictures and a break and pressed onward, listening to the sounds of the forest, the streams running and... honking horns? We heard the parking lot just below the summit before we saw the dozens of behemoth buses belching out diesel and letting off seemingly thousands of tourists. It was a similarly dispiriting feeling I had climbing Mt. Washington- up early to hike, only to arrive at a parking lot of folks who'd driven it and were just looking for souvenirs and bumper stickers. We pushed through the crowds to the trail the last few kilometers to the summit, which was clogged with new tourists, those who werent taking the gondola the rest of the way, and the last few steps hindered by demands by schoolgirls that we get in pictures with them- (really should start charging for these!) And ultimately the summit was pretty spectacular, a massive gold Buddha and temple crowning the dramatic peak with some phenomenal views. Lunched at the summit and decided to stay up there as well, and awoke early the next morning for a somewhat disappointingly cloudy sunrise before heading down. And about ten steps down the clouds broke, and I mean, seriously broke- within minutes the stairs were transformed into rushing two inch deep rivers and waterfalls as we scrambled to the lower summit to find a bus in the parking lot we'd been disparaging less than a day before. But boy was that ride home in the rain sweet, even though my clothes are still drying a day later.
So its back in Chengdu now, a few more days in China for Pandas, Bamboo and hopefully some more interesting culinary adventures. Probably one more email before I head home Saturday. Meanwhile, thanks for reading and really looking forward to seeing everyone next week! By the way, great NYTimes article about contemporary Tibet here...
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