We woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning, again, and met Fang, our tour guide. He advised us to leave our travel bag at the hotel and take only backpacks. The hotel will charge only 10 Yuan, about a dollar and half, which is not a lot of money, but isn’t this what micro-payments are about?
We were trafficked, again, by a minivan, to a bus that took us to the entrance to the mountain park area, and then another bus took us about half way up the mountain.
Up on the mountain we finally understood who is in our group. We were nine, or if you like - me and eight Chinese people. Fang told us we could either climb the first 6.5 kilometers by foot or take a cable car up the mountain. Five of us chose to climb - Julia and myself; an annoying girl in her early twenties and her mom; and a middle aged woman, who climbed like a real trooper, while her old husband took the cable car.
The way up was hard, but really nice. Many people on the trail saw me as a much more interesting attraction than the mountain. “Halo!”, they usually called, usually pairing it with an awkward hand up, kind of like an native american greeting style gesture. “Hello! Ni hao!” I replied to one of them. This was where we both exhausted our knowledge of the other person’s language. His friends, however, were very impressed. “He replied to you! wow, you really speak English? where did you learn it?” said one of them, according to Julia’s translation.
Anther group of youngsters was more intrigued by Julia and mine’s relationship: “oh… she must be his tour guide!” said one of them, forgetting that regardless of whether she was right or not, Julia can understand her very well.
All along the track, there are a lot of people carrying supplies up and down the stairs. These supplies are being delivered to the various kiosks that are scattered along the path or the hotels that are at the top of the mountain. Some of these men carry at least 40 kilograms, as we estimated by counting the amount of water bottles they can were carrying. It’s interesting that there’s enough manpower for this transportation system, but not to build an automatic system.
Notice the cell-phone stowed in his carrying device.
Our strategy for not being late to the meeting point was to make sure we’re always ahead of Annoying Girl and Annoying Mom, AKA The Annoyings, and the middle aged woman, who was actually climbing the mountain like a trooper.
We got to the meeting point. Fang was there with those who took the cable car - Mrs. Trooper’s husband, an old lady, a quiet lady with a red coat and a talkative lady with an orange coat. Feng gathered us said a more polite version of “Welcome to Yellow Mountain! It’s not called that because it’s yellow, but because we tricked you into buying these stupid yellow raincoats before you came up here!”. By the way, every kiosk on the way up sells these coats, contrary to what we were told by the girl who sold them to us yesterday. Damn you, girl!
Fang took us for a hike around the flatter top of the mountain, which is really pretty. Fang is very good at, again, trafficking people, and also showing us rocks that look like other things. On the top left corner of this picture, for example, is a monkey watching the valley:
There were also rocks shaped like a fish, a rabbit riding a turtle (or was it the other way around?) and an iguana humping a squirrel. I might have misheard Fang’s interpretation on the last one, I admit - my Chinese does need more work. Also, the rock sure looked like an iguana and squirrel shagging to me.
The Annoyings were being very annoying, unnecessarily yelling to each other and stopping every single second to take a picture. Here is Annoying Girl:
After a while Fang took us to our hotel, where we got a chance to drop off our stuff while the group, who were all staying in another hotel, waited for us. We all walked around some more, and then Fang sent Ms. Talkative (who was also isolated in a separate hotel), Julia and me to watch the sunset from a nearby peak while he took the rest of the group on another hour and a half hike to their hotel. We had time to stop in a lobby of one of the hotels to get some coffee, which was one of the best coffees I ever had. Not because of the actual quality of the coffee, but because I was cold and tired and hadn’t had a cappuccino in ages.
The only good thing about the air pollution in China is that it makes really nice sunsets.
We went back to our hotel. Although the hotel was reeeally nice, our room was freezing and would not get warm, which is unfortunate when you’re on the top of a fucking mountain in the middle of the Chinese winter. After a long saga that included sticking a credit card instead of the room key in the room’s electricity slot so we can leave for dinner while the AC warms the room, getting dinner, thinking we locked ourselves out of the room, figuring out we were not locked out, getting into the room and discovering it’s still cold, we finally got the staff to get us a portable heater. We went to bed early because tomorrow we need to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, again, to hike to the hotel where the rest of the group stayed where we will all watch the sunrise.
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