The Long March

Emei Shan, China

[this is a bit long, sorry]

So I'm writing this from the Wanfu nunnery (but typing it later) about 3000m up on Mount Emei, about 200k west of Chengdu. As a nunnery, it seems to lack a significant populace of nuns, or maybe they're just the non-head shaving kind. Either way despite the fact that it is populated with travellers, etc, and is rather noisy for a Buddhist nunnery, it's significantly less so than the St. Rose of Lima convent on a Friday night.

Emei Shan is one of a seemingly endless number of holy mountains in the Buddhist world. I think there's at least four or five here in China including the big one (Kailash) over in Western Tibet. Each one has a big story about it, but forgive me because I forgot the one that goes with this one as they're kind of formulaic, and after three years of traveling intermittently in Asia they blur together. Just assume that some boddhisatva or something was passing through on a pilgrammage and miracles happened and elephants flew or talked or something and so they built monasteries and such here.

Emei itself is a series of mountains ranging from 1 -2.5k meters (3k -7.5k ft) all the way up to Mount Emei which is about 3.1km tall (10k ft). It covers a HUGE geographical area and features at least a hundred miles of trail & roads and is covered with temples, monasteries, pagodas, nunneries, etc. Somebody put together a page with some nice photos of it here.

There's a couple of ways you can do Emei - the wussy sissy I'm a little baby way, where you can drive to various points almost all the way up to the summit and then walk the last vertical half-mile (or even worse, take a cable car), or the hardcore badass way, which is to start at the base at Baoguo Si and takes about 2 days of walking and about 50-55k total. Since I've got bigger mountains to climb in the near future I went the hardcore route.

The park itself at the lower elevations especially reminds you of Chinese painting type stuff - bamboo forests & gingko trees and brown rocks and waterfalls (except for the occasional exposed sewer pipe or high tension wires). Allegedly there are even a few pandas there, but considering that many parts of it are the standard 690 ring Chinese tourist circus I think the only pandas are the ones you can buy at the souvenir stalls that line the lower levels. It did however have a seriously huge sampling of insects around though - and even better most of them were of the non-stinging/biting variety. I think it's home to 500-1000 species of moths & butterfly alone, which I would believe - they had all kinds of crazy looking butterflies there that you only see shellacked against a wall in a museum. There were also these wild cicada like things that made this noise that sounded like a rusty windchime from Children of the Corn or something that were mildly disquieting.

As for the hardcore route, after screwing around visiting a few temples & monasteries at the lower levels I finally got cracking in the early afternoon, which was a mistake. It wasn't hot but it was ungodly humid, and slippery and wet as hell. Within a few minutes of climbing you're drenched (and you've also fallen on your arse a few times). After about 4-5 hours of hiking up and down (that's the hard part about Emei Shan, you don't just climb a 10k foot mountain, you ascend and descend about 4 or 5 3000-6000 foot mountains first and then climb it) I was dead tired and had covered about 10 miles. So, having been misled about a scarcity of hotel beds (thanks a lot, Rough Guide to China), I pulled into the first dumpy prefab hotel I found.

Big mistake. Not only was it a dump and a relative ripoff, but it featured the worst bathroom situation I have encountered yet (which I was too tired to notice before I hd paid). It featured a nasty little in-ground Chinese squat toilet, with a shower. And by with a shower, I mean the shower head was directly over the toilet. Needless to say, despite the fact that I was sweating more than a Uighur discotheque, I chose to forego a shower that night/morning despite the possibility of killing two birds with one stone. It also had the effect of killing my appetite and putting me in a nasty mood the next morning.

So the next morning I cleared out around 7:30 and headed down the trail towards the "monkey joking zone" with a bad attitude towards all primates, which was heightened by the ineveitable first few hundred "HAA-LO"s from Chinese passersby. Any westerner who spends an extended amount of time in China can tell you that it's basically impossible to walk down the street in any place outside of maybe Beijing or Shanghai without 1. everybody staring, and 2. somebody (usually kids, but adults do it too) shouting "HAA-LO!!!!" to you all the time. While the "HAAA-LO"'s are sort of welcome and amusing at first, after three weeks they start to grind on you and one gets the feeling that many times it's not so much as a greeting as it's like them throwing a stick at you and seeing if you'll fetch it. I talked to an English guy yesterday who'd been here teaching for 11 months and was on his way back and he said that not having to deal with "HAA-LO"'s was the thing he was looking forward to the most.

SO on to the monkeys - among the few species of megafauna you'll regularly see in Emei is the Tibetan Macaque. They're rather used to humans, and they appear throughout the park as well as in the "monkey joking zone". Joking is one word for it. They're pretty much always demanding food from you and they can get very aggressive - I saw some of them unzip peoples pockets and take stuff out, and they steal peoples bags and run off with them if you're not careful. Also they don't bite, but they threaten to bite you if you don't give them food so they growl at you and bare their teeth. So what I'm telling you is that they are cute, but up close and personal they're not really monkeys, they're more like assholes.

I knew about this beforehand, and since I had my passport and camera and stuff in my bag I wasn't going to put up with any of their monkey crap. As I said before, I was in a bad mood this morning so if necessary I was ready to go head to head with monkeys and was wiling to resort to my swiss army knife, if necessary, and start snapping and dancing and going Sharks vs. Jets on their monkeyasses.

Fortunately that wasn't necessary, they'd give me the growling, teeth baring biting routine and while ignoring them doesn't work, giving them a dirty look and a menacing step usually backs them off, which was somewhat disappointing. What was not easy was the climb itself. It was freaking hard, long, and humid, and I hate to harp on this, but I was losing electrolyes like a madman (though I was setting a decent pace and burning past elderly chinese pilgrims left and right). As I got halfway up the second mountain of the day I nearly crashed and had to sit awhile and eat an extortionately priced but incredibly good bowl of cold noodles.

That was early on though and it got rougher from there. I think today (day 2) I covered about 40-45k total (26-27 miles or so) in about 11-12 hours with only short breaks. It got somewhat easier when I switched on the MP3 player to drown out the "HAAA-LO"s and then decided to sing off key along with most of the songs on it (after 3 weeks and with only 1GB, I know them all by heart), causing much bewilderment and amusement to fellow travelers. This both fulfilled the Chinese "look at this crazy american guy" perceptions and distracted them before they could launch the "HAA-LO" salvo so I consider it successful.

Later on when I saw a group of Tibetans crusing down the other way, I did take the time to shout "TASHI DALEK!" (the all purpose Tibetan greeting) as loudly and stupidly as I could, which rather amused them. Now, hold the phone, I know what you're thinking: "why, that little bastard ain't a-practicing what he's a-preaching". Wrong, this is distinguishable from the "HAA-LO" thing for two reasons: 1. Most or all Chinese don't know enough about Tibetans or just don't bother to shout "Tashi Dalek" to them - and nobody did it to the ones that I saw, and; 2. "Tashi Dalek" literally translates to "good auspices" in English - that is it's a Buddhist blessing. So when you say it to a Mahayana (himalayan/tibetan) Buddhist you're gaining a small amount of merit for them and yourself - and if you do it to a monk (as one of the walking Tibetans was) he gives you a little mini head bow/praying hands type blessing in return - sort of a mutual merit boost. So I was doing them a favor. The only bad part of the experience was that the Tibetans gave me a false impression that I was near the top, to which I was nowhere close.

By the time I'd pulled into the nunnery I'd been hiking about 11 hours (the last few very steep and at relatively altitude) and again, not to overemphasize this, but it was true - sweating like a jazzercise class and was nearly at the wall. The nunnery was maybe a 1-2k walk or so from the summit which I probably could have reached but there was no point as real mountain men know that the summit is only worth it in the morning when it's clear and the view is good.

So the nunnery (all the nunneries & monasteries traditionally offer cheap, relatively clean accomodation to travelers & pilgrims) was where I stopped tonight. They served an awesome vegetarian dinner, which was great even though I had no idea what it was, and had long, animated dinner conversation with a bunch of older chinese guys, about what I am not sure. The nunnery accomodations though spartan were far superior to the previous night's; I'm serious, give me a filthy outhouse located a long walk away over the shower/squat shitter combo any day of the week.

EPILOGUE: This AM I reached the summit early in the morning, which was all right - the view was decent but a little hazy. I was filled with contempt for the total wusses from tour groups in rented jackets who had obviously either driven or ridden up that day who were up there yelling at each other in Chinese (actually that is an oxymoron - all Chinese is yelled, not spoken) but otherwise the 50k hike was its own reward.

Also, note: now that I'm back in Chengdu, I've noticed that it's not quite as relaxed as I thought. The sign in the elevator in the hotel contains a laundry list of regulations for proper and safe elevator travel, including "NO SMOKING OR JOKING" and my favorite: "THE FOLLOWING PERSON MAY NOT USE THE ELEVATOR WITHOUT ACCOMPANIED: 1. BLIND 2. PREGNANT 3. PSYCHOPATH". So if you are a sightless, knocked up serial killer living in Chengdu, I hope you get used to the stairs, sister.