Shanghai on Life

In an effort to get off the beaten track of urban China and see some scenery before the weather gets cold, Sandra and I ventured off with six friends to Huangshan (the Yellow Mountains) the weekend before last. This time the German-ness was broken up a bit by our Mandarin tutor and friend, Amanda, who is from Shanghai…not only nice to have her company but also good to dilute the group with another non-German speaker (especially one who’s not afraid to demand conversations be switched to English). The other five are friends who study at Tongji University (another university in Shanghai), three of which Sandra knows from Mannheim back home.

The trip started with a 6 hour bus ride on Friday evening. We arrived around 11PM in what at first appeared to be the middle of nowhere, China. It’s so funny because despite being a pretty small town and being the middle of the night, a couple of restaurants and even a small grocery store were open..absolutely nobody was on the street when we rolled off the bus and it was obvious that our hungry tourist selves were a sight for sore eyes for those restaurant owners. That night we stayed in a hotel which Amanda had arranged. We each paid 30 RMB (~$5 CAD), though the posted price for a room was over 600 RMB, so it’s easy to see that it pays to negotiate in China! We ate a big Chinese dinner in the middle of the night before turning in, mysterious and delicious as usual.

The next morning we left at 9 and hit the grocery store for breakfast and lunch supplies. Not big on refrigeration in this part of China (I guess the energy costs are not economical for shop owners), we were limited to strange, dried Chinese mystery goods, Oreo cookies and white bread. So cookies, bread and warm water it was!  I am sad to say that a large portion of our weekend was spent mainly on this diet, especially brutal when you’re trying to make it through hours of mountain climbing each day.

We took a bus to the base point for hikers and began our hike up a million, gazillion, badillion stairs that would soon become our nemesis for the next two days. Stairs, stairs and more stairs, I am serious when I say I wouldn’t have believed before that hike that I was physically capable of climbing so many stairs in such a short period of time. Imagine hours on end of climbing stairs straight up a mountain side, is this anyone else’s version of hell? Now, I was definitely in favour of the cable car option but nooooo we have to climb the mountain! I guess that’s what you get for traveling with a bunch of fit, hike-happy Germans. Stairs aside, the views were pretty breathtaking. Seeing the Yellow Mountains makes you appreciate Chinese paintings – I couldn’t get over how much the landscape resembled a painting (or I guess I should say, how closely Chinese paintings resemble this landscape).

Amanda mentioned that everything is a bit more expensive on the mountain and after about two minutes of climbing it was pretty clear why. All food, drinks, and supplies consumed on the mountain are carried to the top by men. Needless to say, these guys had the most ripped calves you’ve ever seen in your life. A long bamboo pole resting on one shoulder with two packages tied to string and balanced on either end, these men carried everything from toilet paper to vegetables, to flats of water and even gigantic watermelons. So you can only feel so sorry for yourself after you see these guys. Suddenly you’re not feeling so ‘woe is me’ carrying up your one weekend worth of clothes in your backpack with padded hip straps.

Four or five hours of stair climbing later we arrived at the hostel on top of the mountain hungry and covered in sweat. We changed and went back out to explore the nearby views and ate some apples and cucumber from a small stand as the hotel restaurant didn’t open until 5:30.

The hostel we stayed at was pretty hilarious. We slept in the most enormous dorm i have ever seen. There was one room with at least 100 people sleeping in it either in bunks or tents on the floor. We were staying in a “private dorm” of 8 women around the corner from this huge room, but in fact the walls were separated only by corrugated metal with gaps at the top and bottom, so as far as sounds, light and germs go, you were in fact sharing with about maybe 120-140 people.  The best (read:worst) part was the bathrooms..2 bathroom stalls and one sink for women, 3 shower heads for the whole dorm – I am not kidding! But overall Chinese people are much more tolerant of these cramped quarters unlike us privacy and personal space obsessed westerners and nobody seemed to mind much except us.

That night we sprung for the much needed all-you-can-eat buffet and a short stroll around in the fog after dinner. In the evening Amanda informed us that we would be hiking an even more difficult route the next day.  At first this seemed to defy mountain climbing logic, don’t we get to go down the mountain after climbing up it? But nooo, we had to then climb across the mountain range and then take a cable car down. And so we went to bed early and nobody slept as best we could considering our 200+ bunkmates.

Now, the whole point of sleeping at the overpriced, under-washroomed dorm on the top of the mountain is so that you can wake up in the middle of the night and book it up to the nearest peak to see the famous Huangshan sunrise.  So despite not getting much of any sleep we rolled out of our bunks at 4 in the morning to perform our tourist duty. Stumbling around in the cold and dark on wet stairs, none of us had considered that before sunrise it’s dark and we might need a flashlight but we made do well enough with the light from our cell phones. We found a suitable peak and waited for half an hour in the dark on its windy face. Waiting and waiting it seemed to be getting lighter… a bit cloudy, not the best morning for a sunrise, but we kept waiting. Crammed on the peak, a group of now about 15 of us and maybe 30 Chinese people, shoulder to shoulder, everyone stood quietly and waited. Brighter and brighter it became and eventually I was aware we were standing in full daylight and had seen absolutely nothing! But still, everyone just kept standing and staring off at the horizon, just waiting for something to happen when clearly it was over. The sun had risen on the other side of the mountain, and the 40+ of us had dragged ourselves out there in vain. Really just too  hilarious! Right on par with our palace double-dipping in Korea in my opinion! Here we had suffered all this travel hardship for this sunrise and ended up facing the wrong direction.

Cold and feeling silly we retreated back to the hostel for a breakfast of instant noodles, basically you’re only choice on the mountain.  So we started hiking again at around 6 and it was I guess around 11 or 12 by the time we made it to the other side of the range. We took the cable car down the other side of the mountain to save our knees and finally got to see some Huangshan monkeys on the way down!

From the bottom we did an hour or two worth of busing and transferring buses before arriving at Hongcun village, a Chinese village at the base of Huangshan also a UNESCO World Heritage Site as of 2000. One of the locations used in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Hongcun has a reputation as being the “village from a Chinese painting.” There were young art students painting and sketching literally around every corner, something I’ve yet to see once anywhere else in China. The village was established in 1131 and is apparently quite well preserved. The Internet tells me that the village was originally built by a feng shui master to resemble a cow..not something you notice just by passing through, but interesting all the same. We wandered around, ate some street food and met some really cute kids who were unusually proficient in English. We got back on the bus and headed back to the city to catch our bus back home. Some crazy mission-impossible style taxi taking, KFC eating, bathroom-going stunts later we made our second bus on time. Exhausted on the bus ride home we mostly slept, though I did manage to meet my first random Canadian in China, a nice guy from  Montreal doing his masters in architecture in Shanghai.

So we survived the Yellow Mountain, and though it wasn’t exactly a relaxing weekend getaway, the good company, scenery, and shenanigans made it more than worth it.