West Holy Buddhist Peak, Mt Emeishan!!

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Not quite at 100% after the (very wet) events of last night, but I figured that Mt Emeishan shouldn't be much of a problem. it was *only* the highest mountain I would climb, at 3099 metres altitude. And trust me, that last 99 *did* count.

Emei at the top is a beautiful buddhist sanctuary, and is one that I definitely want to visit again. At the moment it's possible to stay at the monastery, with all the monks. While lacking in internet connections, it does boast three thousand years of history, and monks. (who aren't quite as old. probably.)
Somehow I don't think that this will still be the case in a few years, capitalism kinda trampling over the sentiment of offering food and shelter to lonely pilgrims on their travels, by principle.

Its beauty is legendary, and is named because the shape of it is supposed to resemble the eyebrow of the goddess of beauty. See what they did there? The Greeks would never have put a Roman Catholic church on Mt Olympus, haha.
I should add, that this must have been one very *pointy* eyebrow.

The four of us (Anna, her older cousin, younger cousin, and I) caught the 6:40am (I know!) bus to the foot of the mountain without a real idea of how to go about climbing it. Anna and I were quite ready to just start plonking ine foot in front of the other in the general direction of ^up^ but Ma Ben, being eldest, felt that we wouldn't make it by nightfall, and would have had to take responsibility had we been stranded with the monkeys by nightfall. Monkeys!

The problem was mainly the lack of reliable information. The locals get paid if they can bring customers to a hotel, so everyone will tell you to explore some shrines and come back down to stay at *their* hotel, from which they'll drive you up the next morning, for sunrise. There are apparently NO HOTELS except for the overpriced one at the peak, which 'most certainly' didn't have any vacancies.

Anna and I weren't gonna chicken out and taxi it to the top, nor did we believe that our fellow chinese weren't enterprising enough to build some kind of checkpoint somewhere (some sources told us of a hotel at Xi Xiang Ci, about two thirds of the way up). Yeah, being cynical together is actually a lot of fun.

We were right.

As a compromise, we wandered around some of the shrines, always ending up back at the same tree for some reason (lol it didn't seem as comical as it sounds now, at the time). Anna spotted a monkey which turned out to be a squirell.

We took a minibus halfway to the top, (in retrospect, this is advisable unless like me you have this sadistic desire to punish your thigh muscles) but we were backed up for an hour while news trickled down to us that there had been a landslide. Of course, me and Anna are like, "what, again? How troublesome" while the others panicked. We fell asleep.

So, I'm ashamed to say that I spent part of the ascent of this mountain snoring. Hence, anybody wanna come with me to do this one again? Maybe on the circuit to inner Tibet? I feel like checking out the 'Roof of the World' which no doubt someone else on this site will tell you about.

At this point, there was a 4 star hotel (whaddya know?) and a cable car station to take you to the Jing Ding, or Golden Summit.

The local monkeys (famous on Emeishan, thriving soley on sweets and stuff) scared the hell out of Anna!

We trekked it. lo, it did rain. It was actually an incredibly hard trek, with steps so steep that if you stood upright one one and reached out, you'd be able to touch the steps ahead. If we had walked all this way, it would have been dark, and with all the fatigue, I'd probably feel stoned. (-there's always next time!)

Met a scruffy guy about my age outside the temple, wearing owl-rimmed glasses and buddha beads that hung from his neck to his knees, who had climbed the entire way, on the route that I had suggested, staying overnight at Xi Xiang Ci, and there were hotels along the way, which were neither overpriced nor fully booked.
Hehe, I just couldn't resist: Ma Ben got the "I told you so" look.

We stayed at the Jing Ding (if they charge you 20Y to put the heater on, TAKE IT) and had a good laugh. Over dinner, Ma Ben explained how the lower air pressure at high altitudes affected the way the steamed rice tastes, which I had never understood before. I had always just put it down to poor quality rice

At dawn, we trooped back up to the monastery to find that the visibiity was so poor, we could hardly see the building, let alone the distant peaks, cloud seas, buddha's aurora, or even the sun, a million miles away.
A red circle appeared for about 10 seconds somewhere higher than I expected it to be, and disappeared again.
A big disappointment, and we all retreated to the hotel and promptly fell asleep again for a few hours.

The descent was long and arduous, with little conversation passing between us.
It was the way you'd expect Legolas, Gimli, and Strider to travel at the end of Lord of the Rings 1, the fellowship having just been broken and everything. But stopping every now and again for a photo :P

Ma Ben trailed at the back, like a hobbit.

I concede that if we had to climb all that way, under our time constraints, we would either have failed, or it woulld have lacked any sense of leisure.

Our little 'fellowship' did split later, so close to the end, when we came to this sort of mountainous crossroads.
Anna and I headed up again, determined not to miss Emeishan's famous waterfall and Monkey playground, apparently only 30mins away according to the guides we were eavedropping on, while Ma Ben and Ma Xing Yu took one look at steps going *up* and decided to meet us at the parking lot.

Despite much of the mountain being under construction, the waterfall was truly worth the effort, and we got some excellent pictures there. We found a crab, incredibly.

Alone with Anna once again, I really felt how expnentially easier it is travelling in smaller parties. Nobody foresaw that Anna would be so much more athletic than the two cousins, and I don't know how much of it was a feminist facade, but I'm grateful that she held her own on the mountain, and didn't leave me as the only one hungry for adventure, and willing to wask that extra few kilometres.

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