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Published: January 7th 2012
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Last August...
So me and my room mate Zac woke at 0545 Sunday morning and sneaked out the hostel before sunrise at what felt like an unholy hour. We looked down the end of our road and at the cross road we could just make out a busy market at the small cross roads ahead. As we got closer and began dodging the vehicles and manoeuvring the hectic scene I couldn’t tell if people were bartering or arguing about a car accident. I was still half asleep.
But Zac soon got us to the park where we would take some steps up one of the incredible finger mountains that they call hills round here. We were soon climbing up hundreds of steps, my heart pounding and then suddenly we were looking over Yangshuo, a stunning view of valleys of mist shrouded rocky hills. And below we could see the the town. It was strange how as we were in this tropical mountain paradise surrounded by trees and quartz encrusted weird rock faces we could all the time hear the hooting of car horns and the busy streets down below. It didn’t mar the experience mind you, it was just
a funny contrast. After Zac took a few photos and I soaked it all in, we decided upwards and kept walking. Then the steps finished and we took to a rocky track, then tracky rock, then tricky rock, then bouldering. It was becoming more challenging but we were loving it. The last little bit was some slightly tricky bouldering but we made good time and we still had almost 2 hours to get back in time for our first class.
The view is more than stunning up here. An occasional dragon fly whizzes by. The sun is a bright orange disc rising into the sky and has already chased the misty shrouds away. A moment of timelessness.
Then we could see the adjacent hill called Moon Hill which had two pagodas on where people were doing their morning exercises.
Zac took photos,
I did some Chi Kung.
We had been still long enough.
The cicadas started up.
It started to get hot.
Time to head back down.
On the other side of the peak the bouldering was much less tricky and it looked like there was a bit of a path down. So we started down that
track in the hope it would be easier. At first it was quite easy. Then we were scrabbling through what Zac called “brush”, a better word for what I’d call bushes and stuff. There were one or two small walls that we climbed down until we suddenly found ourselves on top of an almost 100m cliff. After some thought, we decided this wasn’t the easy way down after all and begrudgingly climbed back to the top again. Across and back down the other side. Oh, bouldering down is trickier that going up, Why did I forget that? Upwards you can see where you re going, then feel around with your hands, find good holds. Going down you cant see where to put your feet, cant feel as well with your feet and thus have to be slower and more careful. But we took it as a challenge and agreed that we liked challenges. Occasionally we’d find a small wall too steep or with not enough hand holds or too tall to descend (without harness!) so we deemed it a dead end and make a small back track to find another way down. The occasional tree to grasp made it a
lot easier as some of the rocks were quite sharp to grasp with all your strength.
When we reached 0830, I had a few minutes of sorrow knowing that I would be missing breakfast, my favourite meal of the day. But loving climbing so much soon took my mind off my spoilt Western belly. Actually it was still quite a far way down and we were very unlike to make it down even to be on time for our lesson. I decided not to tell Zac how I usually have crazy adventure like this. For once I wasn’t completely to blame. Instead we agreed that being late for lessons is never usually this exciting, we climbed onwards and upwards.. or downwards and leftwards? Until we got to another small cliff. We were close to the bottom, just above canopy level of the trees at the bottom of the valley. We could see litter below. This meant there was some sort of path or place where devolved cretins that dropped litter were able to gain access to it. We must be close but just this damned cliff! So we carefully went along the top of this small cliff, climbing around
jutting out rocks, bushes and trees. Until eventually as I climbed around this rock face I could hear and, yes, SEE some old men walking down some steps. STEPS! Great! For some reason I scrabbled back behind the rock face. I couldn’t explain why. It just looked a bit funny I guess, compared to these sensible men walking casually down some steps and me crawling precariously around this cliff face, hanging on, covered lightly in dirt, leaves and twigs entangled in my hair. I crawled back to tell Zac and we were soon on the steps looking “civilised” too. We were happy to be back on a path.
Next thing we know we’re in the busy noisy town trying to cross the crazy roads. I was telling Zac how I was craving and in search of four things when I left Beijing: swimming, forest, mountains and climbing. Out of these four things I got a good dose of three in one morning! I was very happy.
Our morning lesson was with Owen, our boss who we hadn’t met yet. We were 50 minutes late. Oops. We came in apologised and sat down. He seemed a lively, friendly and good humoured guy. He was explaining about some of the dangers of the local area. By some ironic synchronicity, first on the list was.... rock climbing! He asked if anyone here had been rock climbing before. Without hesitation me and Zac put our hands straight up, grinning.
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