Mt. Emei

Very early Saturday morning, around 6am (and that after biking home from The Bookworm at 11.30pm and not sleeping until around 1am the night before) I woke up and tried to force myself up. I actually managed to get myself out to where I would meet my friend at around 6.50, only 10 minutes late and Lily (not the same Lily that got me the job here) was even 5 minutes later. We took a taxi together to the Chengdu South train-station and arrived there about an hour before the train would leave - taking trains in China is much like flying I think, it's not exactly necessary to arrive like an hour before departure but close enough, and they have some kind of security check even though it feels totally unnecessary, they basically just put your bag through an x-ray and i doubt that anyone even looks at it, and no one checks your body anyway, it makes no sense but people do it anyway.

The train took 3 hours and was probably the least comfortable train ride I have ever taken, it only cost us 9kuai though, Imagine going to Göteborg (or rather Halmstad at that speed) for 8kr, and we arrived in Emei (the city/town/whatever) at around 10.30. A girl that got on the train two stations before Emei told Lily how to go around to get to the mountain so we could avoid the probably over-expensive tourist tricycles that attacked me the second we came out from the train-station. We took a bus instead, 1 kuai, to the center of the town and had our lunch there and bought some food in a super market, the girl told us that the food on the mountain was both bad and expensive. Another bus, this time from centre to mountain bus-terminal for 2.5 kuai each.

The mountain bus was not that cheap though, and took a lot longer than we had though, we took a bus to what we though was the highest point we could, it is rather confusing there actually, a stop called Leshan I think and that cost us 40 kuai each. It was already after 12pm when we started off and the bus ride up the mountain took around 2 hours. It was a rather interesting ride though, with the vegetation changing the higher we got, not the way you would think though, mostly in color; from a green that came in an unnatural shade which you would only think you could find on an oil-painting but still with the exquisite detail of a pencil and turning to greens and browns that is more like the crayons we played with when we were kids and finally showing some yellow and red at the higher points of the mountain, unfortunately the speed of the bus, really uncomfortable speed under those conditions, and the overall humidity and impossibility of taking photos through the dirty windows of the bus prevented me quite efficiently from taking photos of all the wonderful mountain views we passed by, and the few times we stopped for, I think, refilling the water in the bus there was no view at all. The only thing that was as expected was that there were more pines higher to the top, but where Swedish mountains change from trees to only undergrowth to nothing at under 2000m above the sea you could still find tall tress stretching for the sky even at the summit, 3077m above sea level, of this mountain.

120kuai more to spend to even enter the higher areas of the mountain, a typical thing here actually, if there is something people likes to see, even if it is something totally natural like a mountain or a forest, they will charge you for it, and usually a lot, exploiting things seems to be second or even first nature to the people here. We still had to pay though, we couldn't well turn around and walk down at this point, which was probably why no one had told us about this fee before (I think Lily knew about it but she hadn't mentioned it either). By the time we reached Leshan it was already after 3pm and beyond time to start climbing - climbing a mountain in China is not like what we think of as climbing, as every park in China comes paved and with "do not walk on the grass"-signs mountains comes with stairs, and so does mount Emei (of course) - and climbing we did, in the Chinese way of course. It took us nearly 3 hours to get to the top and through all that time the most interesting thing we saw was a monkey stealing Lily's coke bottle when she turned her back to it for me to take a picture of them, I suspect it was rather used to stealing bottles like that because it already knew how to get the drink out of it, it pretty much only bit a whole at the bottom of the bottle and drank through that, we only saw 3 monkeys on the whole way though so it was rather disappointing.

Our trip was probably really bad timed, I think that this time of year it is usually the same; the top of the mountain was covered in a cloud and no matter how marvelous view you could imagine at some points you still couldn't see much further than ten meters, so we basically just walked (climbed) further up. In total the climb was about 7km long and with about 500 meters elevation, but it felt much much more, I would have thought we were walking at a 45% degree all the time but that is impossible. I was still soaked with sweat when we finally reached the top, passing by two smaller temples on the way up and ignoring the cable-car ride they had, we still kept climbing the last bit to the main temple at the summit where you are supposed to have all these marvelous view that you can read about, I guess some of the pictures I took there turned out quite ok anyway, but as I said I was soaked to the bone and it was freezing cold so after a short time we tried our way down to where the hotel (rather hostel) was.

We managed to negotiate a two bed room for 60kuai but no private toilet, the room was pretty much just a walled in area with two beds and no heating, I'm guessing the insulation for our room was still comparably good since we didn't have any outer wall. We had dinner at the hotel, which cost us another 60kuai, which seemed to upset Lily, but it was actually quite good, really good even, it was freezing cold though. Later Lily made friends with two girls, Sue and Linger (probably the funniest name so for, except may miss About) who had been climbing the mountain the whole day, they could speak some English too. We planned to watch the sunrise together in the morning, apparently one of the things you have to do there even though we all had our doubts that we could see anything in the cloud.

We slept quite early, around 9pm already, but neither of us could sleep well, I went up to the toilet like three or four times, probably because of all the hot soup I had had for dinner, and Lily said she couldn't sleep because of my snoring, very likely since my nose was totally plugged, and that was one of the other reasons that I couldn't sleep. We managed to get up at around 6.30 and managed to miss the sunrise, it was even more cloudy in the morning than it had been the night before so I doubt we would have seen anything remotely like a sunrise anyway and that despite the freezing cold - cold is not like cold in Sweden, I'm guessing with the lower pressure and stuff it could have been as low as -5 degrees without forming much ice but it was humid, extremely humid, so you cold feel the cold in a way that is difficult to describe, and well it is the top of a mountain so you can imagine that it's rather windy, it was COLD, I took it better than the girls though. We still did run around taking photos for a few hours though and then the 4 of us took the cable-care - also a funny thing, where normal people try to have the car running as often as possible with a normal amount of people (like the cars in Hong Kong where they have 8-10 people in each car and cars running constantly) the Chinese build ONE large car and press in ONE HUNDRED people in it, running only for 5 minutes down it was still ok, but I really don't get the packing.

We said goodbye to Sue and Linger and tried to find a bus to a middle of the mountain stop where Lily wanted to do some more "climbing" and see more monkeys, I was just hoping to catch a better view without a cloud in and around it but we found that we had to walk down the 15-30 minutes climb to Leshan again. This was the path where we had seen the monkey before and this time we saw a lot more of them, maybe 10-20 of them in total, and we fed them some crackers that only the smaller stupid ones accepted (they really tasted bad) and got some nice photos with us and them and everything. After the monkeys we caught up with Sue and Linger again and we walked down to the bus stop together and said our goodbyes again. We bought a bus ticket to mid mountain place but when Lily realised that we would have to buy another ticket for the same price to get down from the mountain we gave up and used that ticket to go down instead, it seems they only have one ticket down and one up no matter where you are on the mountain, and this ticket cost us 30kuai each and that was about what Lily had left after paying 30kuai for the cable-car, besides we turned out to not have much time left. The cheap train we took only departed twice per day, once in the morning and once at night, 9.30pm I think, and we came to the train-station at around 3pm, we took a much more comfortable and expensive, 36kuai each, bus instead and ended our journey in central Chengdu at around 6pm.