Fanjing Shan

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To get to Fanjing Shan (Mt. Fanjing), the one and only place where the Guizhou snub-nosed monkey lives, I first took a twelve and a half hour overnight train from Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan province) to Guiyang (the capital of Guizhou province). From there I had some directions written in my notebook on how to get to Fanjing Shan. I can't remember where I got the directions from but it was probably Lonely Planet because most of it was wrong! (Which is to say, the major points were correct but all the important details were not – such as might happen if, say, the person writing it had never actually been there). Still, I got there with no problems, first taking a six hour train ride from Guiyang to the smaller city of Yuping, followed by a one and a half hour bus ride to another small city called Tongren where I stayed overnight in a hotel by the bus station. The next morning I caught another bus to a town called Jiangkou about an hour from Tongren, and then another bus for another hour to the village of Heiwan and finally I was there!

Fanjing Shan is a major tourist attraction in its own right. There's an 8000-step stone staircase all the way to the summit, but if you're not feeling fit there's also a cablecar. I had a plan for seeing the snub-nosed monkeys and it was probably the feeblest monkey-finding plan that there has ever been. I had a photocopy of a scientific paper about the distribution of the snub-nosed monkeys on Fanjing Shan, the results of surveys undertaken in 2007 and 2008, which said they were found in four pockets. Most of these were not in areas accessible to tourists, as far as I could tell, but one had part of its distribution somewhere in the area of the cablecar. My plan was simply to take the cablecar to the top of the mountain and hope that there was a good view over the surrounding canopy from which to scan with my binoculars. Like I said, a pretty lame plan! And it turned out to not even be a workable plan!

I arrived in Heiwan about 11.30am, found a hotel, had some lunch, and then went to the entrance to the mountain. Fanjing Shan is actually a national park so there is an entrance fee and some great huge gates to stop any access outside of opening times (which put the kibosh on any planned spot-lighting!). The entrance fee was 90 Yuan (about NZ$18), and then there's a 20 Yuan shuttle which takes people the 9.5km up the road to the cablecar. The annoying thing with the shuttle is that it waits until it is full before heading off, and this time of year is not a busy one so sometimes I was sitting there a while! When I got up to the cablecar station I discovered that the fee for that is 160 Yuan. The costs were starting to pile up! The cablecar is pretty impressive, or if you don't like heights like me, then maybe terrifying is a better word! There's one point in particular where it crosses between two peaks and I swear if you dropped a penny out the window it would take four days to hit the ground. I tried not to look straight down and hoped the cable wouldn't break. The start of the cablecar is at 850 metres, the top of it at 2032 metres, and the actual summit of the mountain at 2572 metres. According to the photocopy I had the altitude range of the snub-noses is 800-2200 metres – basically right between the start and the top of the cablecar. I was expecting the temperature to be cold, probably even with snow considering it was December, but in fact it was quite warm, so much so that I had to remove a couple of the extra layers I was wearing. There is a nice (and steep!) stepped boardwalk trail up top through forest with lots of well-made signage about the local flora and fauna, but the only wildlife I actually saw there was an Elliot's laughing thrush. From the top of the cablecar there weren't really any good viewing points of the forest lower down because the mountain is quite rugged, so my plan for the next day instead became to just take the shuttle to the lower cablecar station and then walk up the staircase heading to the summit and ride the cablecar back down (it is 90 Yuan if only taking it one way). It wouldn't give me a great chance of seeing snub-noses but it would certainly be better than hoping to see them from out the cablecar window! And there should be lots of birds and other animals to see along the way.

As I mentioned, the stone staircase up the mountain has 8000 steps in it. It runs for over 6.5km apparently, but it doesn't just go straight upwards. The mountain isn't a single peak like one imagines when they hear the word “mountain” (think Kilimanjaro or Fuji), instead it is a great mass of different peaks, sort of like a Klingon's forehead, so the staircase trail meanders all over the place. It took me six hours to get to the top. In the first five hours I saw three birds. That's three individual birds: a grey-capped pigmy woodpecker, a speckled piculet and a red-flanked bluetail. It was ridiculously quiet. I also saw some monkeys but they were Tibetan macaques and not Guizhou snub-nosed monkeys. When I was almost near the top I found some fairly fresh branches and leaves on the trail which I fancied may have been knocked down by snub-noses (I was too high up for macaques by then), and then I found what I think was some snub-nosed monkey faeces on the path. The article I was talking about before had made a point that the faeces of the snub-noses are very distinctive (“like strings of abacus beads”) and no other animal on the mountain had similar droppings. So that was something at least. I was pondering what to do for the next day, because I really didn't want to walk up those 8000 steps again, and I didn't want to do it the other way either (cablecar up and walk back down) because walking down 8000 steps sounded even less appealing, and it would be stupid to just ride the cablecar up and down hoping that some monkeys would just happen to be underneath at some point. I was pretty much deciding on just giving up on the mountain and walking the access road tomorrow instead for lower altitude birds. But then I heard something crunching on the dry leaves that cover the ground up here. I'd been tricked twice already on the way up by the sound of water escaping from the water pipes that run along the track, but this was definitely something walking. I waited, and then a male Temminck's tragopan comes strutting out of the undergrowth, across the path, and off the other side. What an absolutely stunning bird!! This is a pheasant along the same lines as the male golden pheasant, so brilliantly plumaged that you wonder how they even survive. Some animals look absurdly colourful when you see them in zoos but in the wild in their own habitat they are actually well-camouflaged. Not male pheasants – they are just absurdly colourful full-stop. It wasn't a long view of the tragopan – because of the topography the track runs mostly along ridge-lines so a few steps off the path and whatever it is you see has already disappeared down the slope – but it was a good view for the time I had. That sealed it for tomorrow – back up the mountain it would be! I also got a new mammal that day. The tragopan turned out to have only been maybe fifty steps below the top cablecar station where the boardwalk trail is; and on that boardwalk trail I saw a maritime striped squirrel (related to the Swinhoe's striped squirrels I have seen elsewhere in China). I'm not sure why they're called maritime striped squirrels (their scientific name is Tamiops maritimus) because they certainly don't live in the sea!!

The next morning I was back up at the boardwalk on top of the mountain hoping to get some photos of the striped squirrel. He wasn't there, but right below one of the platforms was another (or the same) male Temminck's tragopan!! I even managed to get some really awful photos through all the saplings and undergrowth. So definitely worth going back up again. On the way down the mountain I saw three maritime striped squirrels and got a passable photo of one of them. There were a few more birds than yesterday but not a lot. Woodpeckers are really common up there though: I saw more grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers as well as some great spotted woodpeckers, and I heard a lot more than I actually laid eyes on. No monkeys, not even macaques. When I got to the bottom of the staircase I decided to just keep on walking the 9.5km to the entrance instead of taking the shuttle. On the river that runs alongside the road I saw white-capped water redstart, plumbeous water redstart and brown dipper, making up the trio of river birds I have been seeing together since Tangjiahe. But then a different river bird, the slaty-backed forktail. I've seen these before in Malaysia and Thailand but this was the first one in China. Then a little forktail flew up to join the slaty-back, and a few minutes walk along the river there was a pair of white-crowned forktails! I don't think I've ever seen three species of forktails in almost the same view before. Other than that there was a couple of mini-bird-waves mainly composed of grey-cheeked fulvettas with a scattering of mountain bulbuls, speckled piculets and rufous-faced warblers, and a Chinese bamboo partridge on the road and that was it. It got dark before I reached the entrance gate – I just happened to have my spot-lighting torch in my bag, coincidentally – but I didn't see anything interesting.

Final day at Fanjing Shan I did the same as yesterday: up to the top on the cablecar and walk back down. Heavens knows what the staff thought of me – everybody else who visits is just there to go up the mountain and back down, and then they leave town. This was my fourth time going up! The weather was a little different today; up at the top it was drizzling and the fog was so thick that the building where the cablecar ends was invisible until you were almost going into it! Because of this I skipped the boardwalk trail and just headed straight down the staircase. Not far down I dimly saw a shape on the steps below through the fog. I raised my binoculars and saw a male tragopan – third day in a row! The fog made it easier to sneak closer but really the bird seemed fairly unconcerned. For something that is often so hard to find, pheasants are sometimes a bit stupid. It moved slowly down the steps, pecking away at the ground to the side, and then suddenly there was a second one. Two male tragopans together was definitely not something I expected to see! I took a bunch of photos but all of them were out of focus because while I could see them just fine I couldn't seem to focus the camera on them properly through the mist. Not many woodpeckers on the mountain today, just a pair of grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers and a speckled piculet. Quite a lot of streak-breasted scimitar-babblers though, some of them in a mixed flock with spot-breasted scimitar-babblers, but other than that the only birds were a red-flanked bluetail and a flock of black-throated tits. Once again no monkeys but I knew when coming to Fanjing Shan that the snub-noses were a total long shot. The multitude of male Temminck's tragopans made up for it!!

Down on the access road walking back to the entrance I saw all the same birds as yesterday minus the brown dipper and bamboo partridge. When I'm walking on a road through forest I have a habit, as all animal-watchers should, of pausing at each bend and having a quick look at the road ahead in case there are any animals out in the open, like the bamboo partridge yesterday. Today I neglected to do so at one particular bend and I was kicking myself afterwards, because there was a pair of Elliot's pheasants around that bend! They were right on the edge of the road, at the bottom of the uphill slope, and the female shot straight upwards into the forest as I rounded the corner. Just as my brain was registering “that's a pheasant!” I realised the male was there too, dithering about in that confused way that pheasants have when they don't know what's going on, head bobbing about like “What's happening? My wife's flown away! What do I do? Oh hell, I better fly away too!” and he flew straight up and disappeared as well. It was a brief sighting but good enough to claim it. If the male had been alone I think I would have got a great look at him because he really didn't seem to know why he was flying away! The thing was, I had been looking out for Elliot's pheasants up the mountain but I didn't expect to see them on the road because the field guide says their altitude range in inland areas is 1000-2000 metres and if you recall the park maps put the lower cablecar station at 850 metres. If that is accurate then I saw the pheasants at about 600 metres or so, well below where they should have been. But then down at the entrance gate, supposedly at 310 metres, I also saw mountain bulbuls and black-headed sibias which should be above 1000 and 1200 metres respectively according to the field guide. Something seriously screwy with either the birds or the maps here at Fanjing Shan!

Tomorrow I head off towards Shanghai.

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