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So, the evil empire graciously permitting its employees a 3 day holiday (read - could not attract any potential students), I took the cue and shot off to Emei Shan with Caligula and the boy. Emei is one of the 4 principal holy Buddhist mountains in China, and offers a rewarding, atmospheric ascent to its 3099 metre peak and several fascinating cultural sites on the way. More importantly, it is infested with monkeys. My Chinese experience has shown me that monkeys are the base currency of universal humour. See mancub, they wanna be like you (ooo), wannna talk like you (ooo), walk like you (ooo ooo ooo) but are stupider and clumsier, while there’s none of the taboo of laughing at mongloids, Farrelly Brothers style. Oobee do. It suited one of my classes to change my name to monkey, and whenever I held up a picture of a monkey in an animal vocab lesson, it drew peals of laughter. And I just thought it was an example of British irony. What other word could you spontaneously utter, aside from flange to liven up the dullest of dinner conversations, job interviews or court proceedings? I would have ticked the Emei Shan box at some point anyway, but stories from travellers of these Tibetan Macaques jumping out from the trees to steal from hapless climbers, hopping around temples and battling with government appointed old-women-with-sticks for mountain supremacy made me approach the trip with unconcealed relish. Monkey relish! See how funny that was?

The monkey link is a good way of talking about my teaching and travelling companion, Caligula, the original King of the Swingers, the Jungle VIP. This is obviously not his real name, unless you thought his dad had been listening to A Boy Called Sue around the time he was spawned. No, Caligula was a nickname conceived in a moment of literally flat-out inspiration. Eva, Ole and I were laying in the former’s lounge, discussing the hedonism of the last few months, and comparing the Chengdu laowai life-style bubble to ‘the final days of the Roman empire’, when who should walk in but Eva’s 68 year old flatmate and his half-aged Chinese girlfriend. If the metaphor of the crumbling decadence of the latter-day Roman Empire was to hold true, then this interloper would have to be Caligula. Not that he’s guilty of murder, incest, bestiality or that sort of thing. But he’s a startlingly virile guy who wanders round in tight leapord skin Y-Fronts with pipe in hand, doesn’t mind a drink or pornography, and likes to head out to clubs and dance with all the lay-deez (embarrassingly well as it goes, particularly for any young companions in tow). I’m going to have to qualify the above with the fact that Caligula is a decent guy. He’s open-minded (when does that become permissive?), interesting, unselfish and genuinely decent company, and I get on particularly well with him. And although the bulk of this entry may thusfar suggest otherwise, he is certainly not here on the basis of sex-tourism. There is certainly a transparent strata of desperate old and middle-aged guys here to pick up young Asian women (and even more pathetically, even younger people than that), and you can spot them in the early hours at all the western establishments, seemingly bartering (they may well be..) with hard-faced, insistent young women wearing tiny skirts and cut-off tops. Caligula has travelled all over the world, and attracts women in every stopoff, the last but one being a member of a tribe from a small pacific island he was volunteering in, and the last a native Queenslander. He wants to experience the world, and as many of its women at the same time. His current lady, whose name he has approximated to Choo choo with his basic Mandarin, is equally pleasant, and whenever I come round to the flat, she intimates that I want to eat, and will not accept any kind of no, like an Oriental Mrs Doyle.

Choo-Choo -chi fan? [literally means eat rice, an invitation to eat]
Me -bu xie, bu xie [no thanks no thanks]
Choo-Choo -Hmmm. [pause] chi fan unintelligibleunintelligibleunintelligibleunintelligible
Me -bu xie. Wo chi le fan. [could be wrong, but should mean I’ve eaten already]
Choo-Choo -unintelligibleunintelligibleunintelligible chi fan unintelligibleunintelligible [shrugs shoulders to emphaise my size and that if I do not eat a meal per hour I will surely collapse]
Me -bu xie! ba le! ba le! ba le!
[She responds to my further exclamation of no thanks! I’m full! Full! Full! by starting to retrieve leftovers from fridge]

Choo Choo speaks next to no English and Caligula the same with Chinese. Occassionally I can help out, but otherwise it goes one of two ways. If it is a heated discussion, then both will talk aggressively in their own tongue, unwilling to submit to compromise. If it is a conventional discussion, the pocket translator will come out. It has difficulties with anything over 3 words, and consequently produces some gems. When this mild-mannered lady was questioning our company’s recent decision to move a middle-aged American lady in with Caligula, she tapped at the machine, pressed the audio key and out came in a Stephen Hawking monotone; WHY LIVE WITH SOMEONE YOU RECKLESSLY DESPISE. I don’t think those were quite her sentiments.

Caligula and myself were to be accompanied by Choo Choo’s 16 year old son on our trip, who Caligula refers to in true Homer Simpson style as the boy. After a teary goodbye from his mother (for a 2 day trip!), we encountered two oddities on our bus, that it was half-filled (people are normally standing or sitting in kiddie stools in the aisles) and that an English language film was played. We stepped off the bus in the feeder-town at the mountain’s base to the typical bustle of the hawkers quoting us ridiculous prices. Though Caligula is mild-mannered, he occassionally flares up at the slightest thing, signalled by his normally acceptable Aussie accent degenerating into something off Kath n Kim. He began ranting at the hawkers go away! while I stood about bargaining us 30kwai rooms for the night from an initial 200kwai charge.

After a meal, I retired for the night to our dorm room, completed by a sleeping Chinese girl and a petrified old French Woman. An immense storm startled all of us in the middle of the night and kept us awake for several hours. Darts of cold blue lightning flashed constantly through our thin curtains, thunder boomed and boomed while rain unceasingly battered down. Not the wholesome night’s rest we had anticipated before starting our 30km uphill trail.

After some early morning baozi, I caught the bus to Wuxiangang, arranging to meet the others at a point 4km up the mountain trail. As I entered the mountain park, the merchandise stalls were just setting up. They were not only replete with the normal crap, but also with the addition of monkey soft toys and trinkets, and walking sticks that were also to cover as whacking sticks should the monkeys come too close. A brisk (flat) walk brought me to Qingyin Ge (pure sound pavilion), constructed on an outcrop at the point where Bailong Jiang (the White Dragon River) and Heilong Jiang (the Black Dragon River) converge. At this point the ascent started, a further 2km up endless flights of stairs until I met Caligula and the boy, and a foretaste of the pain that ascending Emei would cause. The Emei pattern was established then; endless flights of painfully small steps (forcing me to adopt the penguin-walking gait) badly cut out of native mountain rock. Every 10 minutes of steps would terminate in a refreshment stand lodged on a small plateau, signalled dozens of steps down by flapping multicoloured tarp sheets, which served as a useful mental incentive. These little hermetic cubby-holes probably acted as temporary dwellings for the devout wandering monks that inhabited the mountains in far greater numbers prior to the modern wave of tourists, I considered in a long-winded and pretentious moment of reflection. Of course, for the sheer logistical difficulties of supplying these establishments and also bearing in mind you’re f*cking exhausted and have no other option, even after haggling you’re still paying double the standard prices. It contradicted the frequent bi-lingual signs scattering the mountain that declared Emei to be an area of ‘Fair Trade’, the first such initiative I’d seen at a tourist site and also completely unheeded. The affront of paying a couple of kwai extra soon turned to shame whenever we were passed by the basket carriers, shifting beers, food and even weighty drums of kerosene to such inaccessible places, their shoulders lacerated alternately with dull blues and reds from bearing the pole that balances their twin loads.

I caught up with my companions just before Wannian Si, or the Temple of Ten Thousand Years, which is about the length of time it feels like to climb this thing. The whole nature of the mountain changed as I came out to the clearing before the temple itself. Vegetation pruned back, restful, clean pavillions, large, even steps constructed from granite blocks and hordes of Chinese tourists, marshalled by flag-wielding, bright-yellow tour guides pattering fuzzily through dinky megaphones. This was the spot where the cable car met the mountain’s principal temple, cueing lots of phoney-kowtowing and trinket-buying at the temple. And annoying walking. Chinese tourists walk languidly, but always with a complete disregard in the middle of the path, forcing the adoption of rollerball tactics to pass through. As soon as we had bypassed the temple, the mountain returned to its previous state of unkempt solitude.

We soon gained companions. As we passed through the first refreshment hermit-hole, a gang of stretcher bearers gestured that they would be willing to carry us up for a fee. We refused, but they began walking up with us anway. Despite lugging their stretchers up hundreds of badly-cut stairs on a typically humid Sichuan morning, they ascended with easy chit-chat and were perfectly perspirationless (the cause of alliteration over correct English), in contrast to me wringing out showers of sweat from my shirt at every stop. Like vultures, they began to circle Caligula, who was having a tough time of it, and was pausing for ever more frequent mini-breaks on the way up. I took his bag, and tried to give him the eye of the tiger through my enlivening speeches, but then realised how crass it was for a struggling 24 year old to be giving a game 68 year old motivational speeches. Indeed, it wasthe boy who gave up first, and asked that Caligula (from a vastly insufficient stash Choo Choo had given him) pay for him to be stretchered up a kilometre. Caligula, though incredulous at his lack of resolve, agreed. To further emphasise this sense of shame I took the role of the Chinese underclass and shouldered the stretcher for several minutes, drawing gasps from the rare Chinese tourists we encountered. Although this embarrassed the boy into refusing the stretcher after this point, I would certainly pay for these Kodak moments the next day. At this point we met up with a fleet-footed French woman who would restrain her natural atheleticisim and join us on our ascent.

Imperceptibly, we had entered into a bank of mist that thickened with every step we took. We even began to lose sight of eachother and inhabited our own little islands (standard English lit. symbol for fog, that); though Caligula was lagging by just a few steps, he simply wasn’t there (ahem, Usual Suspects). The growing clack of a walking stick alerted us to the odd descending Chinese tourist, otherwise, we would meet them but a step’s distance away, though my heavy step-climbing grunt would no doubt have prompted alarm several flights higher. Steps above and below trailed into the mist, and each visible section was hemmed by heavy banks of conifers swamping the slopes, the odd bright outbreak of azaleas and a rare aimless butterfly. My mind began jostling with the problem of 2step or 1step. Although the nature of the steps would sometimes determine how many steps to cover in one g0, other times it was a banal self-discussion point to take my attention away from the increasing isolation and boredom. Frenchie was gliding up with the 1step, but she was a lot lighter and graceful, while the boy was looking painful at the 2step. Caligula could have been crawling on his hands and knees a flight away, but I just couldn’t see. I decided to alternate.

After a further 15km of chastening step work (West Park has nothing on this) we reached the Elephant Bathing Pool, noticeably lacking in either elephants or bathing pools, but a slightly larger enclave accomodating several refreshment / souveneir stands. As I lumbered from the last step up onto the level, I was greeted with the vigorous entreaty Hello Water! Everything is for sale in China. If there is a kwai to be made, then there will be a dozen entrepeneurs competing for it, from the corporate level down to the rip-off replica operations. And in China, aside from the ubiquitous commonplace store, specific items are concentrated in specific streets. Just south of me there is a street where every one of the 20 or so shops offers house lamps and lighting. There is an alley slightly closer which is the only place I know that sells weighing scales. To the east of Renmin Nanliu (People’s South Road) is Science and Technology Street, alternating immense electronics malls with smaller family-run outlets. Its symmetrical double to the west of Renmin Nanliu is concerned with sporting goods. To the far north of the liveable city several dozen sculpting yards stretch out for a mile, displaying the statues of oriental lions that act as sentinels to every noteworthy building in the city. It is far more beneficial to the consumer than the retailer, as you can shop for the best price within the span of a street, although when you consider the communal mentality of their recent political history (I try to avoid certain words) you better understand why.

It also means that the black market must function within this same retail area; indeed it brazenly picks up custom from the glossy shop fronts of the legitimate organisations. If you loiter around stores that stock official merchandise for more than a few seconds, you will be met with a hookline. Outside the sports stores in Chun Xi Liu, teens will approach you and ask Hello Adidas? and upon an assenting nod of the head you will be led to a small side-street flat 5 minutes away, in electronics malls you will be met with Hello Dee-wee-dee? and taken to shoddy postered-off cubicles on the top floor, the same with Hello phone? on the Mobile Phone concourse and Hello IP? [International Calling Card] near to any laowai-heavy hangouts. Though there is apparently a policy to crack-down on these backdoor shenanigans, they will either find other temporary lodgings, or in the case of the dee-wee-dees, simply resume in the same place 2 weeks later.

So the point of this digression on Chinese retail culture? It became a joke, and a surpisingly valid one with legs, to greet these hawkers with Hello Water! or the Chinese equivalent ni hao Xuia! before they could get their hookline in first. No doubt the mental dissipation resulting from the interminable step-climbing, foggy isolation and rising altitude helped.

The first monkey sighting occurred a few flights up at Xixiang Temple, a particular delight to myself and Frenchie. We rattled off a few shots of them lingering on the walled fringe before they darted off into the mist.

A 5.5km stagger later we came to Jieyin Hall, and civilisation. We stepped out onto a broad road, the last stop where buses can drop Chinese tourists. But most would not anticipate walking the final 3.5km themselves. A 2km or so ride on a stretcher and then a cable car to the peak instead. Not to say that we didn’t encounter a large number of local mountain climbers, but it was a very odd demographic. Most travellers tackling a 40km trail would tend to be between 20 - 40. The Chinese tourists though, invariably wearing sandals, high heels or leather Sunday shoes, were either tai pos (old women, and some old men too) rattling away with their whacking sticks, or young families. I couldn’t imagine taking kids between 5 and 10 up a steep, physical and montonous trail, but any that we encountered were mostly chirpy, shouting Hello [and / or] wai guren (foreigner)/ laowai (old outsider) as we passed them. Mostly. One small boy, being told he would have to lie in a stretcher with his Jie-jie (older sister) and not Ma-ma (duh) for a few flights, broke down in tears, and resisting his mother’s attempts to put him on is sister’s lap in the cradle of the stretcher, began to stab at her with the wooden play-sword that had been bought for him from a souveneir stand. I wanted to tell him that I too had older sisters and deeply empathised with him, but didn’t quite have the language skills.

The path between the bus and the cable car transformed to accomodate the greater tourist load, wider, consistent steps, lined with tourist stalls and enclosed by fences to prevent tumbling down the mountain, a fate the boy almost suffered earlier. Despite this threat during our ascent, the density of the mist meant that we never suffered any vertiginous feelings. The next monkey that we met didn’t seem to be unnerved by the foggy chasm his thin branch was bending over either, though I imagine he felt a little more assured than I would have. This was the first true monkey ‘toll-gate’ that we came to. Several monkeys scampered back and forth along the trees and mountain slopes just outside the fence, but were kept in check by a couple of old women in aquamarine bibs and caps. They held bamboo rods, split in two from the handle down, crafting which allowed them to balance carrot-and-stick with the Macaques, to nurture and castigate, the balance of opposites in the true Daoist style. Wrong philosophy for a Buddhist mountain though. The stick was used not only to strike, its potential severity accentuated by klacking the two parted halves together, but also as a pair of tongs to offer the monkeys scraps of food from a small sack held by the old women in their spare hand. Through the eternal face-off between old-woman-with-stick and monkey, Emei tourists are allowed to enjoy seeing the monkey close-hand without being harrassed.

We soon passed the cable car station on the way to our planned lodgings for the night, and the steps again became ramshackle. The altitude and time of day meant that it was now very cold, but as we were still in the midst of a thick cloud of moisture and climbing countless awkward steps, a persisting patina of invasively cold sweat coated our bodies. Despite Caligula’s exhortations we were not getting above the cloud. It was becoming clear why so many religous epiphanies, the commandments, the transfiguration, the road to Damascus and countless others, all happened following mountain ascents. It may sound far-fetched, but Emei boasts its own moments of apotheosis, termed the Buddha’s Aureole. On rare occassions, rainbow rings produced by refraction of water particles attach themselves to people’s shadows in cloud banks below the summit which impels devout Buddhists to jump off the Cliff of Self Sacrifice in ecstasy (phew, thanks LP). The government erected poles and railings to prevent such enlightenment.

Eventually, we reached our lodgings, a monastrey half an hour from the top, where much overpriced and possibly poisonous (diseased Sichuan pork has caused road closure in China and made international news) food was greedily consumed. Battered legs meant an unsettled night’s sleep, we awoke at 5 for some manto (steamed buns) before we continued to the summit for the sunrise. Well, the lower summit, at least, as the true peak requires a further 50kwai monorail ride. Numb, stilted legs reminded us of the previous day’s climb and of the tribulations that were awaiting us on the descent. We passed plush 800 kwai a night hotels by torchlight, before reaching the Golden Summit, the precipice directly ahead and bound to the left by the summit’s temple, Jinding Si, and to the right by a nascent construction site for an ambitious new hotel to outstrip another a few feet below. In turn, a transmitting station for Chinese Telecom overarched the scaffolding of the new hotel. Hundreds of native tourists stood uniformly about like legions of football fans in hired blue and yellow overcoats (where there’s a kwai to be made…) in the darkness, so I ducked into the temple for a look. Same old sh*t, but a low murmur caught my ear, and I tracked to the back of the public arena to a stairwell, where from a respectful position sitting at the top, I had a narrow window on the dawn service. Half-a-dozen monks in dull gold and crimson robes, chanting impulsively fast and tranquilly slow, passionate tones of euphoria and melancholy, timbres of casual speech and full-bodied sing-song, prosiac recitations and overpowering melodies of exhortation, kneeling on prayer mats, rising to their feet, kissing the floor, whispers, sighs and clamorous outbursts of ecstatic thanks and sombre penitentence, rising and falling, functionally communal and vigorously personal, turning as one in response to the delicate ring of a bell, each adopting instruments of sombre percussion, melodic bells and something with the impulsive energy of marracas, before trailing off in a conclusively hopeful chorus to their quarters.

Which was all a little ruined by typically disrespectful and invasive actions of the local tourists. I feel particularly strongly about this while I type, as a middle aged man sitting next to me playing computer games has repeated the same mournful arc of some melody-dirge about a f*cking thousand times and its unspeakably aggravating. So dozens of Chinese tourists began to pile down the stairs and gawk at the service, a few photos were surreptitiously taken, and as the brethren trailed off to their private quarters one guy even followed behind.

The sunrise itself was a big nothing. The enveloping black simply turned into an enveloping grey.

We began the long descent, and the perennial debate of walking up-stairs versus walking down-stairs kicked off. It was a little dicey on the smooth, uneven surfaces after night rain, and it was painful on tired legs to control my momentum and avoid taking the quickest, albeit bone-breaking, route down. Monkey watch - the proprietor of a refreshment stand flung his sandal to scare off a particularly gutsy one, and lost his footwear in the undergrowth.

We reached Elephant Bathing Pool a swift 9km later, checked in with Hello Water! and took an alternate route down the mountain. I say down, but the first couple of hours was as up as it was down, and just about destroyed Caligula. Coincidentally, we ran into the same stretcher carrying vultures trailing other wheezing laowai on their ascent. The route was over the back of the mountain, and was far more isolated, scenic and tougher than the route up. It was the mountain scenery depicted in traditional Chinese sketches; rolling peaks softened by thick, fecund forests, isolated, precarious crags, rushing waterfalls busting out of the foliage, and swooping valleys dominated by rocky streams. 7km later, we reached Xianfeng Si, a temple wedged in the ravine between two soaring peaks. We waited 5 minutes for Caligula, upon which he set-off on one of his endearing blow-ups. With all the assuredness and conviction of the final say in a back-and-forth argument, his first words were Now Jon. This has to be sorted out. I’m holding you up. This has gone on for too long. Don’t wait for me. You’ll miss the bus. I’ll stay in Emei and get it tomorrow. Get going! I assured him that I was pretty f*cked as well, and wouldn’t be blazing any trails, and we still had plenty of time for the bus anyway.

We made our au revoirs with Frenchie however, who had been kicking her heels for a couple hours now. With excellent timing, the mid-afternoon sky blackened and the immense storm from two nights previous was reprised. Torrential rain was flooding down the steps, making it ever-more precarious, though conversely, the basket carriers were dextrously hopping like mountain goats to escape the downpour. I finally convinced the boy to shoulder the backpack that he was sharing with Caligula, so that he could get shifting. Which he did… in a flimsy 4kwai mac modified from a carrier bag, he was stalking us inexorably and doggedly like some soggy bright-blue reaper. The mountain was really busting open. Violent waterfalls were breaking out spontaneously from the mountain-side, drawing mounds of earth with them. Paths were being flooded. We stopped off at a pavillion-bridge, and an old woman seemed to be warning us: I picked up hodzi (monkey) as she pointed to a section of the path being swamped by one of the raging falls. A monkey had been perched on the path and swept into the river, she brusquely seemed to impart.

However funny that image was, it was also false, as we soon realised that she had meant the joking monkey zone was ahead, the largest monkey conservation site in the whole of China, not that I’ve checked since. Despite the rain, multitudes of tourists were snapping and feeding the Macaques (called short tail monkeys by locals), who weren’t going to let a storm get in the way of a feed. We lingered a little to see them close up. Their faces, partially hidden by mousey-brown fur, were hour-glass shaped, with a large enclave for their shimmering black eyes, long thin snouts broadening out to their prominent upper-lips and underslung jaws. They weren’t particularly big, and looked harmless with intermittent drifts of dull pink fur, their blotchy red faces, waves of white whiskers and spikey eyebrows especially making them look like the local tramp. The monkeys will pose, climb on you, sing the hits of the rock n roll era, whatever, you just need to give them some nuts first. One stretched out a hand to me, and foolishly I began to shake it in absent-minded gratitude, rather than offer it food. Its eyes narrowed with incredulous anger, and its jaw suddenly pulled up in bared aggression. Time to leave the conservation area… that PG-Tips monkey in the bowler hat and pin-stripe suit, he wasn’t laughing at his chimp-children’s breakfast-time pranks, he was PISSED OFF and ready to bite the camera-man’s leg.

Despite the monkeys, the stunning gorges and ravines and the terrible beauty of the weather, no photos were taken during the last stretch as my camera had taken on water and was bust. We just about got to the car-park and made our fairly dismal way back to Chengdu, exhausted, sodden with rainwater and with the rank tang of 2 day mountain-climbing man-sweat.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.