Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Hiking Hua Shan and Heng Shan the Chinese way: stairway to heaven and a printer on the top of a holy mountain

We spent most of the time remaining on our visa hiking holy mountains. You might be wondering why I am writing a blog post about it: hiking is a very ordinary thing, isn’t it? It is the same everywhere in the world. You just find a hill and a path, get some supplies, put on hiking boots and walk up until you’re on the summit, right? But in China, also hiking surprised us. Or, at least hiking holy mountains. Anyway, it deserves its own post.

On the top of Hua Shan

 

The importance of being well dressed

 
Dan, our young host from Xi’an, tells us about a holy Daoist mountain called Hua Shan not far from the city. She says it’s one of the five most important mountains in China. Hiking a holy mountain seems like good thing to do, so we decide to hitchhike to the place the trail starts. Dan and her family are way too hospitable and generous to let us hitchhike, though. They insist on driving us to the Huashan town at the foot of the hill themselves. In view of their incredible hospitality, we are relieved they are not trying to fly us there with a private jet or buy us a spaceship, so we don’t even protest. Dan also gives us a map of the hill and explains us in detail how to get to the top. Under the mountain, we say goodbye to each other.

We soon find out that in China, also such a simple thing as hiking is done in a very different way than we are used to.

The surroundings of the hill are very civilized – the way to the top actually starts in the city. At the foot, there is a monastery with a park where every square meter of land is carefully maintained. We want to start hiking the next morning, so we spend the afternoon in the park. We buy some food for the hike – some plastic packages of something we think might be tofu, and some purple sausages. Then we camp in an almost dry stream bed because it is the only hidden spot we can find. I don’t manage to sleep at all as the temperature is still way over 30°C.

The whole night, there is a stream of people with lights and shining phones walking past us up the hill. Hiking at night seems to be a thing. And when I say hiking, I mean walking sometimes in flip-flops or dancing shoes, fancy clothes and with umbrellas.

Early in the morning Vojta wakes up and I give up my efforts to fall asleep in a puddle of my own sweat. We hide our backpacks in shrubs at the edge of the stream bed and join the endless procession moving slowly up the hill. The number of people on the path didn’t seem to grow or drop as the day came.

As the mountain is very steep and rocky, there seems to be just one way to the top from this part of the town. There is an entrance fee to be paid at a big gate. It is more expensive than anything we have tried to buy in China so far but the price is the same for everybody. We don’t have to pay a fine for being foreigners as we had to in some other countries. (It would be pointless here anyway as pretty much all the tourists are Chinese. Pretty much all the tourists are also more elegantly dressed than us (we can again see some people in dresses and sandals even though most wear running shoes and pants one would expect).

Then, we continue to walk up. Instead of a path, there actually are gentle, polished, well-maintained stone stairs going through a gorge between cliffs, along the dry stream bed with occasional puddles of water. On the other side of the stairs, along the rock face, there is a line of stands selling drinks, fruits, instant noodles, souvenirs, hats, umbrellas and pretty much anything you can think of. Sometimes the valley gets a bit wider. On every such spot, there are colourful gazebos, benches or statues. More important spots have boards with information about the place, poems or legends. Often it also is translated into English and sometimes the translation makes sense. 





No watching while walking!

On the opposite side of the stream bed, we sometimes see small stone staircases or ladders going up the cliff, to carved holes half hidden by vegetation. We try to climb up one of these ladders, but almost immediately a guard appears, shouting at us to (probably) get down. So we go back to the crowded path and the mystery of a hole in the rock remains unsolved. 



 


It is early morning, the cicadas scream like crazy. The stairs going through the gorge are protected from the sun by the cliffs and trees and washed by occasional small streams of cold water running down the rock face, so the temperature is almost bearable. The shopkeepers catch the water in pipes and run it over their fruits and water bottles to keep them cool, and then the water flows down the stairs. We are walking fast because I want to cover most of the distance before the deadly heat comes.

Soon, the path gets steeper. That doesn’t mean it is any more difficult or any less maintained and polished, though. If the trail goes up a cliff, there is a perfect, comfortable staircase carved in the rock, with railing, electric lighting (now switched off) and all. We soon find ourselves on a cascade of ancient staircases, with (contemporary) artificial platforms. People use them for taking selfies. Even though we are basically climbing a cliff, at any point the ascent doesn’t get any more technical than walking up the stairs in a building.



The people with umbrellas, dressed in skirts, sandals and office shirts still look as fresh and as elegant as downstairs. We also notice the typical Chinese fashion trend: if you’re a guy with a big belly, the right summer outfit for you is to tuck your T-shirt up and roll it above your belly. If your tummy is big enough, it will hold the T-shirt rolled up. Vojta tried it too but his belly is too small, so his T-shirt keeps unrolling and falling loose. Too bad for him.


Fashion trend for this summer.


Mountain shopping

 

Then the slope gets less steep again – we are almost at the North Peak, one of the five peaks the mountain has. We can now see how pointy it is. The peak has the form of a narrow rocky ridge with a top we can’t really see as there is a building. Stairs and paths are carved into the rock even on places where the surface is almost horizontal. Houses and stands selling stuff appear again. There also is a shop with some dried plants, dead snakes and some things we can’t identify. That’s new – we didn’t notice a shop like that downstairs. At one of the stands, you can pose for a picture with a sword. The place is even more crowded than the hiking path as there is a top cable car station near here.
 
Wanna do something for your health? Get a dead lizard!



It is a bit windy and as we are at 1600 meters of altitude, the temperature is still nice and fresh. It is almost noon, so it will probably not get worse. From the top, we can see the land around us. The mountain seems to be rising very abruptly from a completely flat landscape.

We try to eat the purple sausages we carry for lunch, and we find out they are sweet. It’s actually the most horrible food we’ve tried in China so far. So we eat our tofu supplies instead. Luckily, there are those stands with instant noodles we’ve been making fun of.

The path continues on a ridge (it is very safe and protected with a lot of railings) to the remaining peaks. They form a kind of a pointy ring with precipitous slopes around. It is very airy and gives one vertigo a bit – I’ve never been to a mountain this pointy and steep (and this easily accessible) in Europe. Except for the crowds and tourist attractions, the mountain looks like in a fairytale.

Here on the top, there are no water streams anymore. But there still are shops selling bottled water and many other stuff. The goods are supplied by bearers who carry sticks on their shoulders with heavy load suspended in the front and in the rear. The bearers also collect waste and carry it downstairs. People throw a lot of garbage but the place is not dirty; the system seems to work.




We go to some of the other peaks. On one of them, there is a platform where people put up tents to wait for sunrise. On another, there is an open-air photo studio with a lot of printers. Tourists can have their pictures printed immediately, at 2000 m on a rocky peak. There also is a path made of planks, suspended on the rock face. It is very crowded, so we avoid it.






Along the ridge, there still are trees, pavilions, temples, ancient inscriptions (probably) and small nooks carved in the rocks. The air is fresher the higher we get, so I like the mountain more and more. I try to imagine what the place looked like centuries ago. Even with all the printers and swords and love locks on railings, the mountain seems magical.  





When we are walking down, it is already dark. As the staircase is so user-friendly, it is not even hard to climb down at night. And there still is a never-ending stream of people going up. The zigzag path below us is illuminated by hundreds of electrical lights and it looks like an Elvish kingdom. As we are descending, it’s getting hot again. We decide not to reach the scorching spot where our backpacks are, and stay in the middle of the climb even though we have no camping stuff. We just lie down on the ground in the shrubs, and after the last night up I fall asleep immediately. 





Wishes come true

 

Some days later, several hundred kilometers north, in a temperature lower by almost 20°C, after crossing from the Shaanxi province to Shanxi province (yep, the names are a trap for Europeans) we are hitchhiking to another holy mountain. Mount Heng is located near a town called Hunyuan and it happens to be on our way. It also is one of the five most famous sacred Daoist mountains. This time, we do our best to shop for supplies with more care and try not to buy any sweet sausages. We end up with plastic packages of unknown white content as usual. Most of it probably is tofu or vegetables and some of it are eggs. At least we hope so.

Today seems to be the day of wishes come true. In the morning, Vojta thinks about buying a water melon. Our next driver (who totally could not understand anything we might have been saying) stops at a melon stand next to the road and offers us one.

At the foot of the sacred mountain, we are looking for water on a huge parking lot near a touristy temple. There is none. It can just be bought in shops in tiny plastic bottles. So we keep walking up along the road and we find a small river dam. It is accessible and relatively clean, with no garbage on the shores. Even though nobody swims in there, there are fishers so the water is probably not too polluted either.

Besides filtering some water for drinking, we can also wash our socks and T-shirts and go swimming after a long time. The fishers on the shore stare at us as if we were some water monsters. This is the second time already, so it makes me think swimming probably is unusual, unpopular or maybe inconvenient in China. I am so happy I can bath that I don’t care, though. We eat our melon and are having such a good time that we only feel sorry we don’t have any beer to chill with. A family who is having a picnic nearby ask us to take a picture with them, and then invite us to their picnic. We manage to communicate with them a bit through a translation app. It is an elevating conversation because they understand we don’t understand Chinese. (We have not always been this lucky.) They also share their beer with us and when they need to go, they give us their remaining fruits. I’m wondering whether China is reading our minds today. It’s almost scary.




Heng Shan mountain: the ‟undeveloped part of China”

 

The way to the hill starts on a huge parking lot with a big building with a lot of ticket counters. Actually, most people take a bus or cable car to get to the top. We like walking, though, so we just pay the entrance fee and walk along the road. We are the only ones and it is a nice hike. There are not even too many cars passing us by.

After several kilometers, there is another huge parking lot with a line of shops and stands. The road ends here and from this point, everybody have to walk. Also this mountain has a long stone staircase instead of a path.





Heng Shan seems not as large as Hua Shan and a bit less crowded (even though it still is considerably crowded compared to mountains in Europe). It also is full of temples, caves, gazebos, shrines and boards with inscriptions in Chinese and in lousy English. All of them are on the same side of the mountain, pressed against the rock face. In one of the rooms, I come across an aged monk who tells me something and gestures when he talks, so I get an idea of what he means. It’s reassuring.




Disaster hidden trouble site

Later, we even meet a tourist who speaks English. He comes from a southern part of China and we exchange a few sentences about hiking. ‟It’s my first time here,” he says. ‟I don’t go to these undeveloped parts of the country much.” 

To me, this region seems completely normal. I knew that this part was more rural than the most touristy regions but I am surprised it actually is considered backward. I’m wondering what a developed part of China looks like. If developed means crowded and urbanized, it scares me. 





On the official top of the hill, there is a paved area where people take selfies and then go back again. There are no printers. The stairway continues on a grassy ridge but we are the only ones to follow it. Nobody else seems to care what’s behind the official summit. It’s a lovely walk, though. There are no crowds and the views are nice. Finally, even a Chinese sacred mountain feels familiar.