"The Most Dangerous Hike in China: Hua Shan"

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The title “The Most Dangerous Hike in China” has been coined as a name for this beautiful mountain, so before I go on I will clarify what that name actually means. China is an “every man for himself” country. When you get on the bus, you push and shove everyone around you to get on as fast as you can whether there are seats or not. When you are at a museum, you slide your way between the bodies to get to the front so you can see what is displayed. When you are at a tourist attraction, you shove, slide, bump, push, pull, and any other word you can think of to get your way to the front of a crowd to see what is happening. (And don’t get me started on how it is at the train station.) Is Hua Shan, a mountain of sheer cliffs with skinny pathways, any different? Of course not. So yes, tons of people die every year hiking that mountain. If you catch yourself hiking Hua Shan on a Chinese holiday, you can expect that it will be the most dangerous hike of your life and you will spend your day in fear that someone will push you over the side of a cliff as you wait to slowly take one more step up the never ending stairs. If you go on a weekday, however, that name loses its credibility and you can enjoy the fresh air and scenery of one of the most beautiful mountains in all of China.



The mountain is arranged in peaks – the North, West, East and South peaks. Once you get to the top of one of the peaks, there are various pathways to get around to all the other peaks. You can spend hours and hours up there exploring all the peaks. To get up to the peaks you have two options: hike or cable car. There are two different cable cars, one going to the West peak (the most expensive route) and one going to the North peak. There are also two hikes, one going right from the bottom of the mountain and one that follows the North peak cable car straight up the mountain. The latter is called “Soldiers Way” and is the pathway we took. It is the hardest method with 4,000 stairs (at least… I don’t know where this number came from) but it is absolutely gorgeous. Plus, Chinese people like to “hike” in heels and business clothes, so they don’t take this route.



Our way up the mountain was so fun! It was our favorite part of the day. It was really difficult, but I believe that your body can do anything you decide to do and the second you tell yourself you can’t do it, you can’t and it’s all over from there. So we kept truckin’ along up all those steep steep stairs! Whenever we came to a choice in pathways, we always chose the steeper path. 1. Because it is faster. 2. Because I love an adventure and it made it more fun and memorable to do the steep paths. Some of the steep paths were literally straight up, as you will see in the pictures. At least they had chains to help us climb.



The scenery on these mountains is like nothing I have seen before – at least not in real life. There isn’t dirt on these mountains; they are just massive rocks shooting out of the ground. There also isn’t any order to the direction of the mountains. Some of the mountains (or huge rocks) are perpendicular to one another making for an incredible scene. It took us about an hour and 40 minutes to get up to the North peak and we didn’t regret one second! My hip flexors were pretty dang sore, and Jarek’s knees started getting tired, but we did good I think! After that, we still had about six more hours of hiking around the tops of the peaks. We tried to be fast hiking along the peaks so we could meet up with our friends who took the cable car up. Fortunately, they waited a little bit for us so we got to meet up and hike the rest of the way together.



The day was perfect. It rained in the morning so it was moderately clear air and there weren’t any clouds, which our sunburns can attest to. It feels good to have some color again, though! The compliments I have been getting from Chinese people lately have been along the lines of, “Wow, your skin is so white!” Yes, I know, thank you for pointing that out to me. One person’s compliment is another person’s disappointment. At least they think I’m beautiful! Anyways, back to the mountain.



So if you look up Hua Shan online, you will find scary pictures of the board walk. Ever since I saw the pictures I really really wanted to do it, so we all made our way over to the East peak to find the plank of doom. If you haven’t looked it up online, don’t worry, I will explain it to you. You walk down a pathway that goes around one of the cliff edges. Then you meet a guy with a bunch of harnesses and pay him 30 kuai so that if you fall off you die without any extra change in your pocket. You hook up your harness and work your way down a “ladder” built into a crevice on the side of a cliff. This ladder is actually just metal poles hammered into the rocks. Now, I spent about 25 minutes just on this vertical ladder because of traffic. Surprise. Traffic in China. It’s everywhere here. You see, there isn’t a system set up for this walk of death; you go down and then you have to come back the way you came so you have to climb around everyone on the little space you have for your feet. So I was trying not to get stepped on and run over on this ladder waiting for everyone else who went before me to get off the mountain so I could go down. (It’s like the streets here in China…cars going two directions on a one-way street. They’re used to it.) I finally worked my way carefully down the ladder and onto the board. The board is stapled together on the side of a cliff. So Chinese. I had to climb around people who were still coming back so we very slowly and carefully maneuvered around each other. I stepped around them with one foot and they slowly pressed their bodies against the rock to scoot past me until I had space enough to step my other foot around them. This was the scariest part. All there was to hold onto was a chain and the board is only big enough for one person. Once all the people were done coming back, it was breathtaking! It is so high up and you can see all the mountains around you. It was absolutely beautiful. There is nothing like that anywhere else. It was totally worth it.



This whole entire day, starting at 5:30 in the morning was full of a bunch of “barely”s. To get to the mountain from the city, you have to take a train. To get to the train station we had to take a bus and the subway, so it took a little while. We barely made it to the train station on time to buy tickets for the 7:52 train to the mountain. Well, then we learned we couldn’t get electronic tickets so we had to wait in line. There was still five minutes left before the train left when we got to the window. Unfortunately, the lady wouldn’t let us buy tickets even though there were still seats and the gate was still open. So we had to wait an hour for the next train. The next “barely” incident ended a bit happier. Jarek’s knee was really sore after strenuous hiking all day long, so it made it really difficult for him to go down the stairs. It was 6:45pm and we were slowly making our way back to the North cable car. We were a little past the West peak and Jarek looked at the clock and thought, “What if the cable car closes at 7?” We all immediately rushed the rest of the way down to the cable car. We bought tickets for the car and then had to go even further to get to the car. Jarek and I got there first to tell them we had two more friends coming and not to shut it down. The clock in the room showed 6:59 when our friends made it down to us and we got on the cable car. We were the very last ones down the mountain. The next “barely” was getting on the train home. We had about an hour to wait until the train left. We all ate dinner and were at the station waiting and all was fine. Then there was an announcement that our train was delayed at least ten minutes. I really had to use the bathroom so I used the time for that. The only problem was that the bathroom was outside and across the street. (Bathrooms are hard to find here.) I went out and asked around for where to find it and when I finally found it the lady said I had to pay to use it. I was so mad! I just needed to be fast and I know for a fact all it was was a whole in the ground which is not worth paying for! I was tempted to just squat right there, but I restrained myself. I had no money so I went back to the station only to find that the train actually wasn’t delayed anymore and everyone was boarding… I barely made it. The final “barely” was getting back to our university. Because the train was slightly delayed and very slow, we didn’t get back to the city train station until 10:54. The last bus out of the area left at 11. Unfortunately, the bus stop wasn’t just across the street as you’d expect. It was through the busy parking lot and down the street a few blocks. We were booking it! We could see the bus that we needed to take as we got closer, and right when we arrived we got on and the bus headed back. We barely made it! Again! We finally made it home sunburnt, exhausted and happy at midnight. Needless to say, someone was watching out for us all day.





Out of all the places we have traveled in China, this is one of the most amazing. We would go back any day! There really is nothing like it anywhere else.

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Photos

The Start.
The beginning of the stairs up "Soldier's Way."

Steep
So beautiful.

No Striding?
Where would you stride? Off the cliff??

Red
This is China.

Ignore the butt
I know this is a butt shot, but ignore that because this shows perfectly how steep the stairs were.

Cable Car
See it? Waaaaay up there?

Joel and Mara
Making our way down the ladder.