Hua Shan

March 15, 2009: I had come to Xi'an with the intention of heading north onto 2007's Great Wall journey route and catching up with a couple of nice people in shitty polluted towns.

But somehow instead i ended up at the second completely unreal scenic location of the trip.

When i reached Xi'an i found that a timetable change (it was actually much more likely a case of a Chinese train info website being plainly wrong on the existence of the train in question) meant would mean i would only get to one place - and that, i decided, would be Shenmu County. In fact, flying in the face of my "shitty and polluted" description, Shenmu was recently crowned number one among Shaanxi's 10 "Super-Counties" 强县 in social and economic development in 2008 - although in Shaanxi obviously the competition isn't as strong as elsewhere. The provincial government said it was based on a combination of 30 indices, including those of 'economic institutions, social development and ecology and environment'. Going by my recollection of the state of the environment up there, i think it's probably safe to assume it's the economy and society that are propelling Shenmu to the top of the ratings.

Actually, all of our North Shaanxi favourites from the Great Wall trip were right up there at the top of the list - Dingbian and Jingbian, Shenmu and Fugu. (One day 30 years from now, when the bored grandsons of today's coal miners find themselves hangin' on street corners and hatin' on the (clean) air they breathe, i predict some little red-guard-without-a-cause will end up rapping about those four places.) Even Hengshan, which gave me the impression of being somewhat closer to Burundi than Beijing, was there at number 14, and the whole thing appears to be saying (i may simply be misreading it completely) that sandy, barren, mountainous, rotten North Shaanxi 陕北 is doing significantly better than the rest of the Shaanxi countryside. I continue to rant at people about China's miraculous elevated superhighways (don't worry they all deserve it - especially the foreigners - after asking the question, "What's China like?"). The one between Xi'an and Jingbian County just ploughs through range after range of steep, sandy mountains, bringing the whole "Shaanbei" region within 5-10 hours of the provincial capital, where before it was days - conceivably weeks in many places - distant. The idea appears to be "maintain elevation at all costs", with 400-500km of alternating tunnels and bridges. Mountain in the way? Tunnel straight through it. Deep, wide valley on the other side? Keep the road going straight outwards, Wile E. Coyote style, just add concrete legs underneath, getting longer and longer as required. Just awesome feats of engineering that bring massive social benefits:--


So i messaged my Shenmu County "Taiwan Hand-pounded Pancake" chain store dude (actually "chain sign" would be a more accurate description as the franchisee doesn't need to have anything more than a table and a hotplate) and wondered how he was going. He replied that he was pleased i had remembered him but he "wasn't in that place anymore," that he was now a policeman, and he wished me a safe trip. This i interpreted to mean he was not in Shenmu and didn't have time to see me, and now, reading back over the messages i'm not so sure. Still, i had to make a decision at that point, and the decision was that instead of sitting for a whole day on a train, stopping for 2 hours in a coal town, turning around and getting back on the same train as it crawled back, i would go to Hua Shan, one of China's five Sacred Tourist Mountains.

While in Xi'an that night, i visited the backpackers bar that was the scene of "what's my cat gonna do now?", definitely my personal funniest moment of the last two years. Insanely, one of the two poms from that episode was there in the bar playing pool! He wasn't overly keen to talk it through in detail in front of the other people he was with...perhaps he was fearing i would bring up the bit where he's jumping around like a gazelle trying to escape Randy...

I set off the next morning.



It's a very civilised mountain, as you can see above - the paths are all paved and probably have been for eons. Most tourists take the cable car straight up to the north peak from the other side, bypassing probably half the climb. As i neared the north peak, through the silence i started hearing a buzzing noise like a swarm of bees. It became louder and louder until it finally took form as the sound of swarms of people - although as you will see further down if you get that far, this being low season, these swarms would certainly not qualify as such.




Even now the taming of the mountain continues. This guy and his mates were constructing a new paved viewing platform, presumably out of the mountain itself.



Although there are a few crazy vertical ladders (e.g. above), i saw nothing at Hua Shan that really matched the danger described by this dedicated anti-Huashan website. My biggest danger came from my heavy backpack, whose shoulder straps snapped three times. Whenever this happened i would be dragged violently towards one side of the path, which on occasions meant towards a massive drop. However, the backpack may have actually saved me too: most of the climbing was above the snow-line, on the couple of occasions when i did slip over, my backpack ruled out the possibility of cracking the back of my head.

Most of the time though the bag just made me labour like an old-time coolie. Actually, beyond the cable car station a few times i found myself overtaking or being overtaken by a porter carrying supplies up the mountain for the numerous mini-shops and guesthouses up there. These guys would just about be the coolies' closest contemporary relatives, but given the prices up there (Coke 12RMB, pack of biscuits 20RMB, "convenient" noodles 15RMB) i would hope they were very well-paid. Shame i forgot to ask one his income. Somehow, despite the presence of these hardy, hardy troopers, Chinese fellow mountain-goers still saw fit to comment - sometimes to me, other times to each other thinking i wouldn't overhear/understand - on my "ferocious" European body strength. When i pointed out that most of the people climbing the mountain were Chinese and that their bodies were holding up just fine, the reply would invariably be to the effect of, "Yes but your bodies are better than we Chinese'." After a few times i started inquiring as to the status of Africans' bodies - and indeed, black bodies are physically better than white ones. Although that assessment seems to play out true in the form of the Olympics and ball games, i still find the Chinese tendency to rank the races very interesting. In terms of civilisation Chinese people will sometimes say the Chinese are more civilised than blacks and less civilised than whites, though of course they're more than well aware that the Chinese were civilised long before Europeans. Taking, then, China as the longest-running civilisation, and Africa as the most recently civilised (or uncivilised) continent, China with the worst bodies and Africa with the best, i wonder if many Chinese people would perceive a link between civilisation and bodily decline. And of course, physical degeneration in the form of obesity and no exercise has been a status symbol in China in the past. This idea even Orwell touched on, when he discussed his fear of "progress" leading to brains-in-bottles, in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Impeccable timing, thinking of this now as i'm just about to leave China for years!

The top of Hua Shan is just beautiful: the three main peaks, South, East and West, are clustered together, with a triangular bowl of forest between, covered in snow at least a foot deep. It's dotted with temples, and quite a few trees are marked as being over 300 years old; one was 800. I stayed the night in a guesthouse on top of the mountain, sharing a room with an extremely generous fellow from Hebei who showered me with biscuits and other sustenance-related products. Soon we were joined by another guy who was keen to shout us 15RMB beers (actually probably more like 20RMB - i wasn't paying), and even keener for us to share his long-life chicken feet. We got up early to watch the sunrise from the East Peak, along with about 40 others, mainly students it seemed. I think they got even more of a kick from it than i did: whooping noises reverberated around the peaks all morning, long after the sun had peeped over the pollution line.






Mountains made of this kind of rock must have been the inspiration for the Mario Bros. mountains, no?--


I descended by cable car, which must have increased the number of visitors tenfold when it opened. It's quite a blessing that many visitors don't even climb at all, instead just taking a look at the view from the North Peak cable car station and then going back down again. As i mentioned above, the North Peak was buzzing this time, and just imagine in summer when even these racks, this stockyard, can't control the cable car queues....


...actually it was a local tourism bureau official who told me that, and he told me rather enthusiastically. Maybe he just felt he needed to justify the empty racks. Or maybe to him crowded mountains, as tourist attractions, are, well, touristically attractive.



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Photos