In April I actually had 2
visitors, though you’d never guess now that it’s June…
My second was Eleri Dawson,
intrepid explorer and fearless mountaineer, ready and raring to tackle China
head on. Little did she know that she
would be facing her greatest challenges yet:
Climbing 7000 steps up
China’s holiest mountain…
Eating anything that looked
remotely strange or interesting…
And helping me get a cone
off my foot.
The first few days that Els
was here I unfortunately had to take a few mid-term exams, but that didn’t stop
us from seeing the sights.
Campus.
Zhongshan Lu.
The running track.
Anyone seen any views from
Nan Putuo yet?
On Saturday morning, after wisely
replacing sleep with tequila, we managed to catch our flight to Jinan and then
jumped straight on a bus to Tai Shan.
The city is called Tai’an but this caused train station confusion later
on so we’ll just stick with the mountain name.
At Tai Shan (which you couldn’t really see for the mist), we found our
hostel in a little courtyard off the main pedestrian street.
Els made us visit the Dai
Temple.
Then we got an early night
before our big climb.
We decided to walk the
entire route from the centre of the city, following in the steps of all the old
emperors. It was a little hard to know
when the steps started but after a while it didn’t matter – they just kept on
going.
And going.
And going.
(Apologies for the head
tilt but my laptop refuses to blog these days and Nacho´s computer, Nachete, won´t
let me rotate any photos…)
There were lots of little
temples to see so it was all very culturally interesting, but after the first
few thousands steps I just wanted the culture to go away.
The most famous stretch of
the climb was impressively daunting.
And that wasn’t even the
top.
After hours of painful
climbing and even more painful posing for photos every other step, we finally reached
the summit.
I set about finding the
area where you could rent a tent that was supposed to exist and of course
didn’t. Luckily I happened to ask a guy
about tent renting who did, in fact, rent tents. After wandering around a bit in the direction
that he pointed us, futilely searching for our tent, a guy turned up with a
tent, stuck it on some rocks and that was that.
We were very excited to have made it to the top, rented a tent and
sourced an ideal spot for watching the sunrise in the morning.
Then the guy came back,
told us there was dangerous mist coming down, and we ended up moving to the
nastiest hotel the mountain could offer.
I slept in all my clothes
and lined the bed with my coats. I don’t
think either of us slept, for fear of being in some way contaminated by the
room.
But it was all worth it in
the morning when the mist lifted just enough for a beautiful sunrise.
We decided to descend by
the ‘Donkey Trail’ route, which was amazing – in contrast to the thousands of
people swarming round us on the ascent there was literally nobody on the whole
path until we got near to the bottom. It
took us half the time (which was fortunate, since we managed to bring no
water), had beautiful scenery and there were little waterfalls along the way.
We caught 2 buses back to
the centre, grabbed breakfast and then decided to make our way back to
Jinan. We had all day, so instead of
getting one bus direct to the airport we…took a bus to the wrong train station,
took another bus to the right train station, took a super speedy train to Jinan
(wrong train station), took another bus to the other Jinan train station,
faffed around at the train station for an hour or so, took another bus to some
kind of junction under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, asked a local about
buses to the airport, had the whole community of Chinese people (living under
the bridge) in uproar, were finally directed to the bus stop, and took a final
bus through the Jinan countryside to the airport! Or thereabouts – we had to walk a bit.
We were utterly exhausted
from all the climbing, descending and bus riding and were a little concerned
that our flight back to Xiamen might be delayed, since the one prior to ours
was. But instead of a delay we received
a free upgrade to Business class and flew home in style! Here we are, very happy about this.
And feeling sorry for the previous Xiamen
flight that still hadn’t left. But not
that sorry, because we were in Business class.
We had a few days together
back in Xiamen (during which time we visited Gulangyu, experienced a flash
thunderstorm and Eleri had her first foot massage!) before Els had to fly
home. I was sad to see her go, after all
our adventures. The weird and wonderful
foods of China were sad to see her go as well.
But maybe her inevitable cravings for mantou and jidan, and the red
parcel nut biscuits, will entice her to return; after all, legend has it that
whoever climbs Tai Shan will live to be 100, and there are plenty more steps in
China...
