Emei Shan

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Hi,

Emei Shan is a holy mountain with many temples and monestaries 2 hours south of Chengdu.
I have been hiking there 3 days. In low height, the scenary is beautiful but as I proceeded up and up, the weather became more fogy and hazy so the visibilty was very bad. On one hand this is, of course, a misadvantage but on the other hands this fits my knowledege, based on Chinese movies that I have watched, that China is a fogy and misty country.
Another annoying thing here is that all the trails are concrete and many many stairs so the climbing is very difficult. The mountain is very touristic by Chinese tourists. They normally hike in the trails near the bus stops or the cable car stops as through the mountain there is a net of buses and cable cars. Once I was in the distance from the tourists attractions, I met very few tourists, many porters and many monkeys.
On the first night, I have stayed in a monestary that was under a massive construction so I have had dinner and lunch with all the buildres, floorers, plasterers, etc. The few monks over there seem to have abandoned the worship of Budha and moved to the worship of the tourists.
The mountain is full with wild monkeys. They are quite mean and they attack the tourists in order to get some food. They have exprience: tourists carry food. I don't know if they were that aggressive before the toursits came to this area. In areas of many tourists, they are many empolyees armed with a stick and rogatka in order to defend the tourists. In more remote places, you need to defend yourself and so I did. It is enough just to threaten them with a stick and they flee.
At one of the small resteraunts on the way the owner poured some rice for the monkeys to eat. They soon came and started to eat. When quite a few gathered there, she threw at them stones and they run away. Then they watched from the distance on the woman activities and when they thought it was safe again to eat, they returned, slowly slowly. And again, when quite a few them gathered, she threw the stones at them. This happened maybe one time more and the monkeys did not learn the lesson. Or maybe they were so hungry so they did not think? I could understand if she was offering them a beaf steak, but this was just a plain rice. I had in mind that monkeys are more clever than that. I then looked in the dictionary the work for 'bad' and said to the woman that she is bad. She then explained me something like 'but the monkyes started'. Probably the monkeys and the people over there have a continous and bitter battle for years but what I whitnesed was not a fair fight and I felt pity for the monkeys.

Bye, Sharon

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