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Published: February 29th 2012
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Huashan
I made some Chinese friends playing basketball and one weekend they invited myself and two other teachers to hike Huashan, a nearby mountain with them. I eagerly agree as this presents an opportunity to do multiple “un-beaten” path activities as well as hopefully accelerate my mandarin learning. My friends spoke little to no English and I, even less Chinese, but I felt it added adventure. After doing some research online I learned Huashan is one of China’s 5 sacred mountains, each having significance in Taoist history. If you are like me and never heard of it before please go to youtube and type in “Huashan plank walk” and imagine it before early 2000s when there were no harnesses. The first leg of the journey was the 5 hour train ride, on a Chinese train. I had heard and seen daunting videos of the overcrowded trains. The train station was easily the most chaotic venue I had ever been a part of. I would compare it to black Friday electronics sales without the organization
, made worse by the fact we were running late and had to sprint through the station just to hop on the train just as it had started to pull away. The aisle of the train was shoulder to shoulder because you can buy standing room only tickets for a deeply discounted price. Luckily we had seats, so after we kicked the standing room only squatters out of our seats we were settled in for the next 5 hours.
The rows of seats faced each other with a table in the middle, most being used for card playing or eating delectables such as packaged chicken feet or dehydrated dates. A stewardess stumbled over people through the aisle not to serve or collect trash but acted similar to a 1950s travelling salesman peddling everything from belts to homemade acupuncture kits. Train tickets are divided into hard seats and soft seats much the way we identify first class and coach. Do to the language barrier I was never sure which we seats we had since my friends purchased my ticket. Post Huashan I described my seat to a fellow teacher who had just returned from a weekend trip to Beijing. His discerning question, “Was there livestock running free in the train car?” “No” I replied. “You had a soft seat then.” His train ride to Beijing was 10 hours. We arrived at the Huashan station just after dark and my hosts partook in the ancient Chinese tradition of bargaining vigorously to find the cheapest cab to drive us to the base of the mountain. We began our ascent around 10 pm to reach the top by sunrise. My guides assured me it would be the most beautiful sunrise I had ever witnessed. So like every other epic journey in history, it begins with the first step…… to the ticket booth and paying 175 RMB to enter the “national park.” What the Chinese call mountain climbing we would call natures Stairmaster. There were stone steps all the way up the mountain. Two drunken construction laborers could lay more uniform steps; some steps had 6 inches of incline some were 18 inches apart. After an hour in to the climb and about one seventh of the way up I began to feel how physically taxing this would be. The point when a 60 year old Chinese man overtook me wearing what we would consider house shoes I knew I was out of my element. My Chinese friend Bai Wen Bo (Bai) told me some people climb the mountain slowly and methodically taking 24 to 48 hours. There were stone shelters with benches underneath them where I saw people sleeping. To the indigenous people it seems more of a pilgrimage not just a hike. As we hiked it seemed about every 30 minutes we would pass a stone temple memorializing someone famous in the ancient Taoist community. At the same rate we passed little huts where an elderly Chinese businessman would be selling water, Gatorade, Red Bull, instant noodles, and maybe one local dish. As we climbed higher the price of water steadily increased. At every pit stop I would try like my Chinese counterparts to bargain for hydration, but I had no luck. Laws of supply and demand won at every outpost.
As the midnight hours passed and the sparsely lit trail grew dimmer we climbed by flashlight or a cleverly packed headband light by the intuitive American cohort. Some stretches of the hike the incline seemed to be 89 degrees using vertical steps and chains drilled into the stone as hand rails. At the most dangerous sections vertical chain link ladders rising up 75-100 feet with no sort of rope or harness. To Americans it was a lawsuit wrapped in a death trap waiting to happen, to the elderly man in house slippers just another part of the pilgrimage. We had made good time, a little too good, we reached the top around 5 am a little under an hour before sunrise. I succumbed to the physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation and laid down on a rock and tried to sleep in the 35 degree wind chill but my lumbar region was not having it. During my attempted snooze bad went to worse when it started to lightly drizzle. So now the epic life changing sun rise that I had struggled for was reduced to a foggy mountain morning and one large part of the hike that had neglected the entire time, the descent. The rain made the ancient worn smooth stone into something like Clark Griswolds sleigh riding spray. Everyone in the group lost their footing at least five times. Shortly after our despondent journey down began I was informed that we were taking a tram down the two thirds of the mountain. A tram that had not been mentioned anytime before this journey was embarked on, a tram that hopefully was shut down at night and that’s why we did not use it. As the oasis of the tram immerged in the distance I couldn’t help but look with disgust at every passerby on the way up wondering if they took the easy way out if they were only getting one third of the pilgrimage. On the tram ride down I stared out the window at what seemed to be millions of steps that I had gone up eleven hours earlier. As we waited on a bus to take us to Xi’an we had a broken bi-lingual conversation on NBA stars as I drifted in and out of consciousness against the window as I reflected on my pilgrimage.
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