After we were done looking around the pagoda, we met our friend outside the gate. He took us through downtown Xi'an which was covered in sculptures of people in Tang Dynasty traditional garb and many fountains. All up and down a huge boulevard leading to the pagoda, there were red columns and fountains and bronze sculptures and all of the buildings were at least modified to match the traditional Tang Dynasty architectural style. Our friend took us to a park surrounded by some of those expensive apartments and filled with sculptures, some of which were stone and dated to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). We walked out on to a pier with a view of a lake surrounded with willow trees and stone bridges. From the lake we could see some of the city's skyscrapers, many of which are still undergoing construction. We could see that people had rented little paddle boats to ride around the lake for sight seeing. After looking at the lake, we rode to a newer development on the other side of the lake that was supposedly built on the location of some famous caves. Allegedly, a woman from a wealthy family was forbidden to marry the man she wanted to because he was from a poor family. They left the city and hid in these caves for a really long time so that they could be together. When a war started, he left to fight in the war, but she supposedly waited for him to come back for a really long time. There were fountains and restaurants and small ponds with black swans. Eventually we left to head back to the hotel to meet up with the others who were traveling to Huashan.
When I first arrived back from Karen's on Tuesday night, Lance the fifteen year old volunteer who goes to boarding school in America, came up to me without knowing me and asked me if I wanted to accompany them on the trip to Huashan. I had heard Felix and some of the other volunteers talk about it before and it sounded like something that would be really cool to see and a really interesting experience to have. There is kind of a tradition when it comes to hiking up this particular mountain. The hike is made overnight so that one can get to the top in order to see the sunrise. Another reason for this, which I did not know at the time, was so that one could make the climb without being able to see how high and dangerous some of the mountain paths were. At any rate, since we were hiking at night, we needed to leave shortly after getting back from work on Friday. Lance had told us we needed to be back by 5 pm. Since we had been out all afternoon, we did not have much time when we got back to the hotel. We packed and were out the door trying to find a taxi. The only problem was that it was rush hour. All 10 of us waited for about thirty minutes before we saw a taxi that both was not already occupied and was willing to go as far as the bus station where we would be taking the bus to the town at the base of the mountain. Four were able to fit in the taxi, but the rest of us had to wait for at least two more taxis to pick us up. It kept getting later and later. We changed locations several times. So many taxis passed us that already had customers, but many passed us which were completely empty as well. It looked like we definitely were not going to make the time of the last bus out to Huashan. Lance and Peter were trying to think quickly as to what we should do. Someone started suggesting that we just go early the next day, but we were pretty determined to do the overnight hike. Eventually we found a bus to take us to the train station. We didn't even know the train times, but Lance was determined that we would make it. We told the others at the bus station to go ahead and take the bus and we would take the train which was faster, but which left later. The train station was the most crowded place I think I have ever seen in China. It was one wide open courtyard teeming with people. We had to go through all these people to get to the ticket office and wait in a long line to buy our tickets. While we were there, Lance told us that in order to buy train tickets foreigners needed to have their passports. The problem was both Rita and Hiskia did not have their passports. Lance, however, convinced the train officials to let them have tickets anyway. After Lance bought our tickets, we found our way to a long weaving line and eventually into a set of guard rails that cut through the crowds in the train station courtyard. Lance got us past two sets of guards, explaining that we were foreigners and that he had gotten our tickets and eventually onto the train with about five minutes to spare.
The train was very crowded. There were little benches facing each other, each with barely enough room for three people. This was repeated on the other side of the aisle. In between the two benches facing each other was a little table for food and belongings. The aisle was also really narrow. There were crying babies and people selling food and drinks walking up and down the aisle. One army officer kept walking up and down our car yelling and trying to sell belts which he said had been made by the Chinese People's Army. At one point we went to the dining car to eat some of the food they served. It was not great, but it was decent. There was some rule that stipulated that only train staff could sit down and eat at the tables in the dining car, but again Lance came through and convinced them to let us eat in the dining car. Eventually, after an hour and a half, we arrived in the town of Huashan and it was very dark. We got in the back of this dark van with tinted windows, which was our taxi and drove on rural roads past fields of planted crops and to the town. We passed a couple of farmers who were rolling bales of hay right in the middle of the road.
We met up with the others who had taken the bus right outside the park entrance at a restaurant where they were getting dinner. We got some drinks and all went to the restroom at the family's restroom behind the restaurant (restaurants are not required to have bathrooms around here) and there most of us had our first experience with a really awful, Chinese style toilet. I will leave the rest to the imagination, but all I can say is that I am sure what we experienced was not the worst. It had plumbing.
After a while of sorting out how many tickets to buy and either at student or normal prices depending on who had brought their student ID's, with Lance having to continually turn up the charm and do some more convincing, we had our tickets and entered the park. We kept joking about how high it was and how tired we were already. We had no idea. I think Lance and Peter had an idea because I think they had done it before, but they did not let on at all. And I am pretty glad they didn't. At first I thought it was fine, but it didn't take long before we were all breaking out in a full sweat and huffing and puffing. Really, we were pretty much on the easiest part. It was a paved, concrete walkway which just slanted slightly up for the greater part of the first portion. Every now and then there would be resting places with tables and little restaurants with places to sleep in the back. Everywhere we passed sold drinks, including racks and racks of Red Bull, cucumbers and other vegetables, cherries, and little souvenirs. At first everyone was walking together and making conversation. But eventually it became difficult even to talk and walk at the same time and people got separated all up and down the trail. I climbed alone for long portions of it.
After a while, it got to where it was no longer the slanted paved walkways, but instead, was just sets of stairs with really, really, really steep inclines cut directly into the side of the mountain with chains on the side for support. I could still hike without the chains, but as it got higher and higher, even I needed the chains just because my legs hurt so much. After a while of climbing up and up and up, I could tell that whoever built the trail still had a soul, because there would be sections of flat pathway where the trail would plateau in order to give people a rest before going up and up and up. After a while, Lance and Peter asked a woman at a stopping point how much farther the trail went. She told us that distance wise we were half way (we weren't because of where we ended up going), but that we were only one fourth of the way done time wise, because the last half was almost just straight up (I don't even think that time estimate was correct). After leaving this rest stop, I got the point where my legs were hurting so much that I had to take it so slow and fell behind just about everyone, taking little breaks at every plateau. All along the trails people were stopped where they had given out, on random steps and side places on the trail, just wherever they had not been able to make it anymore. At some points I caught up with the rest of the group, but whenever I did they were always just finishing their break and ready to move on and I was always ready to take another one. Finally, we reached the place where I thought we must be really, really close. In reality we weren't, but it was called the Thousand Foot Cliff. I think that it was a thousand steps to the stop of this one particular section of the trail. Here, the crowd bottlenecked, I think because of how high it was. It was built into the cliff and was almost covered by rock overhead. There was only room for basically two people each holding on to a chain built into the cliff wall next to them. The crowd moved slowly as people took their time one step at a time, one person right behind the other. There were lights built around to help guide people up. The stairs were so small that really only the front of my foot could hold on and I had to kind of balance between one leg and the other. It basically seemed to go straight up and way up ahead, I could see some of the others.
When I finished with this portion, I felt like I had made it. I had certainly not. I looked up having to bend my neck just to see above me and way off in the distance, I could see little guide lights in what seemed to be an endless distance up. At one point, one lady from our group decided she didn't want to make it anymore and left to go back down and sleep overnight in a hotel. After about an hour and a half more, I came up to what seemed to be another plateau and realized I had reached a central area that overlooked many of the surrounding peaks. This was the central peak. On top of it was built a small restaurant, a hotel and the cable car service down the other side of the mountain. I saw the others sitting on a bench. We waited for Andrew and Carlos, the only people missing to catch up but never really saw them. So, we all decided to hike to the East Peak. After determining where that was, Lance said he remembered being there before and that it was about a ten minute walk one way to the East Peak, which is where we were headed in order to see the sunrise. Sadly this was pretty much the only thing he was wrong about the whole trip. And he was horribly, horribly wrong. It was at least another three hours up of some of the hardest climbing we had had the whole trip. Some trails swung around the faces of sheer cliffs or were on the tops of tall ridges with the mountain sliding off drastically on either side. Looking back, it seemed like we had an aerial view onto some of the peaks. Sometimes, grabbing onto the guide chains was difficult too, because all throughout the trail on the way up, people had locked small golden locks on to the chains, with pieces of red ribbon around them. Lance said that they did this for good look. At some points, the locks were clamped on in such great numbers, clamped onto each other layer after layer, that you couldn't see the chains anymore.
It got almost funny at a point because we would climb and climb and climb and Jess would say that we were on the home stretch and it really did look like that because we were to a point where all we could see was sky and the very top of the East Peak, which I think is the second highest peak on the mountain. It was not funny however, when we would turn a bend and see a whole new set of guide lights winding further upward. I cannot tell you how many times this happened to us. It was getting frustrating and I was feeling like my legs would just stop moving at any point when we finally reached this little Taoist temple. In order to get up to where the temple was I could see that there were two possible routes. On one side there was a series of small grooves, not stairs, carved into the flat side of a cliff that went up for a significant distance, but not nearly as far as the thousand foot cliff. On the other side, there was a metal frame with I think what were intended to be stairs, but in actuality, it was more like a ladder with really small rungs. On the sides of either route were chains. I took the "ladder" route and then made it to the top....only to find out that there were even more stairs. This went on for a little while longer. I could hear the birds in the trees and it was getting windier. It was definitely starting to get lighter outside and the sky was turning that dark blue it turns right before the sun rises as opposed to the pitch blackness we had seen all night, except for when the bright light of the moon broke through the trees. Finally, finally, finally we reached a part of the mountain where there were no more stairs. We ran up the dirt, holding on to roots to keep our balance and got to the top. Like I imagined, it was crowded with people. It was not a terribly big peak once we made it to the very top but there had been streams of people climbing all night. It was packed all the way from the high ground where there was this obelisk, monument type of thing built to mark the highest point down to where the stone started to give way to dirt and trees again and began to slide off down the mountain face. I got separated from the rest of the group and pushed and shoved my way to a place where I could sit in between these two people. I still had a lot of people blocking my view, but I saw a thin line of white where these sunrise was beginning so I knew I would be able to see the sunrise. I was so exhausted that I started falling asleep in my seat, but woke up every time there was a tiny new development in the sunrise because there would be this loud, excited cry from all the people.
It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. The white line turned into an orange line, which eventually turned the clouds around it a light pink. Eventually, little at a time, the sun itself emerged until it hurt to look at it and I could then turn around and see what we had climbed. Vast expanses of white granite peaks covered with pine trees in places and bare in others, all of which rose and dropped off in drastic heights and cut off into sheer drops in several places. The mountains around us were easy to make out, but I could see that in the distance there were mountains that continued on for miles, with each set that was farther away being a lighter shade than the one before until I couldn't see them anymore. Way, way off, I could see the flat land stretching out beyond the reach of the mountains and could even make out the segmented fields set aside for crops in the surrounding rural region.
I finally met up with the others as it was pretty easy to pick us out since we were the only foreigners on this peak. We found Carlos who had hiked ahead of everyone else and been there since 3:30, but we lost Lance. After waiting a while, we decided he had gone ahead and hiked back down, meeting him back where the restaurant, hotel and cable cars were at the central peak. It was an hour and fifteen down, so I know that it for sure must have been more than double that hiking up although no one kept time. The views climbing down were also impressive where we saw the whole valley in between the gorges which broke up the different peaks. There were little buildings built right into the sides of the mountains everywhere too, either residences of the people who sold things on the mountain or small Buddhist and Taoist temples.
Once we met up with Lance, we brought cable car tickets. That was quite an experience as well, traveling quickly, hanging suspended thousands of feet...actually thousands of kilometers above the ground, traveling in a matter of minutes what it had taken hours to do on the way up. Once out of the cable car we hurried to the bus station to by bus tickets back to Xi'an and hopped on the next bus. We all crashed on the way back and were delirious when we got into the taxi that took us to the hotel. We basically went back to the hotel and fell right asleep from such a long. It was certainly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen and one of the coolest experiences I have ever had.
Just to give you an idea, Huashan's East Peak (which is what we climbed to) has an elevation of 1302.518 miles above sea level and the South Peak, the mountain's highest peak, has an elevation of 1338.992 miles. I am not sure exactly how much of that we climbed.
The Big Wild Goose Pagoda up close.
Courtyard inside the Da Ci'en Temple near the pagoda
Downtown Xi'an near the pagoda, a huge pavilion of sculptures and fountains and surrounded by traditional architecture
A park we went to after the pagoda.
A lake in downtown Xi'an overlooking many of the city's skyscrapers
The Xi'an Train Station (busier than the Xi'an International Airport) where we took the train to the little town of Huashan at the base of the mountain.
It is fo bidden.
One of the many resting places/camps on the long trail up to the East Peak of the mountain.
We arrived on the Mount Hua's East Peak shortly before the sun began to rise.
At times, the hike basically became a climb, and we had to hold on to chains climbing straight up the side of small cliffs, one at a time.
The cable cars we rode the rest of the way down the mountain to take the bus back to Xi'an.
No comments:
Post a Comment