Chinese Confession - Huang Shan I

At this point, I think it is pretty safe to assume that China is an amazing place. Shanghai is amazing. Hong Kong is amazing. The people are amazing. Being from Colorado, however, I always had the mountains just minutes away. That is something that we don’t have here in Shanghai, so I had not been able to see how the mountains of China stack up compared to those in the US.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Painted Veil”, it takes place in the mountains of China. They looked absolutely amazing. I also remembered the pictures I had seen of huge mountains jumping straight up out of the ground amidst fields of rice. Patches of fog here and there provided just cover to give the whole scene a divine, peaceful feeling. Needless to say, I had pretty high expectations of the mountains here would be like.

When a classmate of mine asked me if I would be interested in going with him and some other friends to Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain), I was quite eager to leap at the opportunity. In fact, seeing some mountains was high up on my priority list.

Okay, here’s a little bit of background on Huang Shan. It has a reputation of being a pretty beautiful place. Okay, that’s too modest. “The Lonely Planet”, which is basically the bible of tour guides (especially for China – don’t come to this country without it, like I stupidly did), actually says that if you go to any place in China, Huang Shan should be it. It’s probably the most famous mountain in this country, aside from Mt. Everest which is on the border. Although it is not one of the sacred Buddhist Mountains, it is pretty close in how much the Chinese revere and honor it. There are some beautiful parks and countryside around it as well. One park in particular is where they happened to film a movie that is fairly well known in America, called “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. I confess that I have not seen the movie, but I assure you it is on my list now.

Our trip started out with a train ride from Shanghai to Huang Shan city. We could have taken the bus, which would have taken five hours, but we opted for the train instead. The train took eleven hours. I am honestly at a loss for why a train would take twice as long as a bus, especially considering the train usually takes the most direct route. I still don’t get it, but that’s what we did. We actually went all out and took a sleeper train, which is what they call cramming a whole bunch of people into an oversized sardine can. It was actually quite fun. We somehow ended up next to a group of people from Germany, so we chatted with them for a few hours.

I should probably also mention that this trip was in mid October. Yeah, I’m a little bit behind with my blogging. And since time is so precious, I will save my illustrious descriptions of the minutest of details and provide a rapid, continuous stream of thought summary of what happened. If you want a visual, picture this as a montage. You can pick your own song to play in your head as the scenes flash before your eyes. Or, if you’d prefer, imagine this being read at a speed that renders it nearly incomprehensible. Whatever suits you.

We arrive in Huang Shan city. Considering none of us have been there, we somehow manage to get around the city pretty well. This city actually was named something different, but I have no idea what it was and apparently nobody else does because they just decided to rename it Huang Shan city to make life a whole lot easier for tourists, although it ends up more complicated because the actual little city at the base of Huang Shan is about 45 minutes away. There is a cool, traditional-styled Chinese street about ¼ mile long that has hundreds of stores all selling almost the exact same thing. It does mean that they got a bit monotonous after a while, but it also means that comparison shopping is a breeze. If you are kicking yourself for passing over that little 3-inch Buddha statue, morbidly obese and happily so, based on the grin he has stretching from ear to ear, you are in luck because the store 20 meters down has the exact same thing. You just have to be able to barter because even in America, $30 is not a decent price. Needless to say I am not buying any Buddha statue. This is just for illustration. Instead, I am buying a Chinese watercolor painting of a beautiful scene of rugged mountains rising above some low lying clouds and a beautiful waterfall. It’s pretty big, and it ends up only costing $15, which is a decent drop from the $55 the man was originally requesting. I’m pretty sure it is actually an imaginary scene, but I don’t really care because it is amazing and I will love it forever. It is definitely worth the $15 I pay. And it was hand painted by a real Chinese person, which is more than I can say for almost anything by Andy Warhol. I’m so glad he’s dead.

I step out of the shop. The architecture on this street is amazing. It’s so Chinese! I snap some pictures. I see an old-styled Chinese pharmacy. It’s still a pharmacy. I’ve seen these before. They’re crazy! One of them had a 3 foot long snake coiled in huge jar of who-knows-what-liquid. I don’t know what it is used for, but I’m going to guess that it is supposed to make children do chores or a man stop watching the football game and mow the lawn or fix the toilet. It’s easy, actually. I mean, nobody would actually want to eat this 3 foot snake. Trust me. If you were presented with the opportunity to eat this snake or else fix the toilet or mow the lawn, you would pick the latter too. It was not pretty. Okay, confession time – I thought it was amazing and would make for a great conversation piece, but none of the girls agreed with me. Whatever. I guess I’m weird like that, but I also happen to want to buy one of the tarantulas that they have perfectly preserved by placing it in a glass mold. I don’t seen any tarantulas for sale though, so I move on.

We eat lunch. Or do we? I can’t remember. Maybe we just snack. Either way, we have to be quick and hop a bus up to Huang Shan. We will be staying in a hostel there at the base of the mountain and hiking up the next day. In the meantime, we have a couple of parks that we will be seeing on the way up. We actually get a van that will drive us up. It is only about $15 to get all of us up there, which is pretty good considering it takes us 45 minutes. The driver is insane though. He is spending more time in the left lane than the right, and I am pretty sure the shocks were either optional in this van that is about the size of a Toyota Camry or else they were worn out about 300,000 miles ago. I don’t dare fall asleep.

We arrive in the small town at the base of Huang Shan. We get in an even smaller van about the size of a compact car and enjoy a non-communal religious experience as we al pray for our lives. We arrive at one park, walk up the trail, and watch in awe as a man actually has a job to sit up here all day and do almost nothing except when tourists arrive at the end of the trail. He then makes monkey calls, throws out some kernels of corn into the forest as we watch, and wait for dozens of native Chinese monkeys come out, climb through trees, flip over rocks, and collect and devour every last kernel. Occasionally they steal a glance at us as we watch, utterly amused. After about 15 minutes, they’ve had their fill, and our camera memory cards have too, and we all go our own ways. We head down, get in the van, pray some more for our lives as the tiny thing zips around on the narrowest roads I’ve ever seen, and drops us off at the entrance to the park where they filmed “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t remember what it is and it would disrupt my stream-of-conscious to stop and dig for it.

The park is amazing. There are hundreds of Chinese people who love to take pictures of the most random things you could imagine. If we were all in Paris, we would be taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower while they took pictures of the pigeons or a patch of grass. But that’s okay. It’s one of those interesting things about Chinese people that I just love. As we hike up the canyon that makes up this park, we pass pools of pristinely clean, turquoise water. A waterfall here, a giant boulder there, majestic mountains rising up over our heads – all is calm and perfect. It’s no wonder they shot the movie here. I didn’t realize the Earth could hide such beautiful places

When we finish, we walk back down the canyon to the entrance of the park, taking a path through the bamboo forests. Once again, we fear for our lives in the tiny van, then arrive at the hostel, eat some dinner, and go to bed.

The next day our hike up the mountain begins, but that will have to wait for my next blog! I took 573 pictures during the whole trip, so I’m still sorting through them and getting the good ones ready to post. But here’s a Huang Shan teaser to build anticipation.