158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo Part 3: CLIMBING A TALL MOUNTAIN

Quite a popular thing to do in China, Lonely Planet says, is climbing mountains at night to arrive at the peak by sunrise. Based on my experience in China, this is a quite popular thing to do, especially among student couples on vacation.

Ed and I weren't originally planning to do this 7 hour trek to Hua Shan's eastern peak (a town some 3 hours from Xi'an by train and bumpy as all hell minibus


), at night but luckily some unfortunate circumstances forced it so. You see on the train I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to call our airline and re-confirm our flight, before 72 hours of our flight back to Tokyo. Remembering this on a shoddy crowded train to a mountain village some 90 hours before the flight in a region with almost impenetrable dialect is a scary proposition. After some long distance calling in the best restaurant in the world


which was paid by mass tip, we met Yens, possibly the nicest person in the world, who found us at her hotel trying to explain that we needed to use their phone and internet for drastic, urgent reasons. She helped us for 2.5 hours!, and we drank beer together for .5 hours (which she refused us paying for because she was a host (I can only hope she comes to Canada so I can pay off the psychic debt)).


So by this time it was 9pm, dark as all hades, and we struck off for the mountain, surrounded by a countless students and other cats, dressed for a rave in dayglo cat ears or bracelets or devil horn hair bands. We all bottlenecked at the ticket booth, where a man screamed and shouted through a megaphone at the budders and violent and surly, throwing them to the back of the line. Ed stood back while I dove in amongst all the clamorers at the booth, 15 minutes pressed against glass which I consider in the top 3 or 4 worst experiences of my life. (Advice for anyone going to China: bring old/current student cards. I forgot mine but everything would have been half price). So now the mountain. Despite all the people, this was far from safety precautioned walk, but incredibly dangerous and harrowing. First it was eerie, then it was bottlenecked and slow and why did I go on this climb,


then it was completely emptying because it was so dangerous, no time to think of anything but the next step. We'd move up these near verticle sets of narrow stairs in a big line...in the dark. All I could do was focus on every step and the sound of anyone falling, which would have severely injured/killed myself and about 20 others.

Then it was something else. On the first panoramic plateau by the north peak (about an hour from the east peak) I saw the stars that had been getting closer with every step. I saw the town lights below. I saw the dayglo and flashlights moving ever up from the sheer drop just left of my feet. I don't want to do anything but just skip on this for fear of ruining it.

Then it was a rest at the base camp of the North Peak, trying to find a spot amongst the sleepers and the weary.

It was 5am, and sunrise was 6.


We ate expensive apples and drank expensive water we bought at a rest spot just below the north peak, and hiked our way to the east and the sunrise.





After a lot of rest and eating and no talking, the day sun shone bright and we worked our way down, seeing all our fellow hikers as they were. Students,

some people in business coats and shoes (!), all dead tired. Also, coming up the path from the gondola to the north peak were the new hikers of the day, families and ice cream eaters and people wanting photos of Ed because of his Mao shirt. We took the gondola down,

stuck in a huge line with gates and all these strange tourist trappings that were a far cry from the mountain we climbed. It was a weird ending.

But at this point, thank God it was over. At the base, we had troubles getting to town, bought Hua Shan mountain gold medals (which impressed customs at the Tokyo airport) took a mini bus to Mengyuan,


ran like exhausted manaics for a terrible train ride to Xi'an (I had to lean on baggage for 3 hours with a man who hiked Hua Shan for 19 hours), hailed the motor-rickshaw that took many lives from us, arrived at the best hostel in the world, drank beer, showered, and then slept, about 2pm now till 10:30pm.

Next Post is the Conclusion.

158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo Part 2: IN SEARCH OF SUSTENANCE

Every travel blog is so cliche. Tales of infectious excitement that attempt to inspire readers to also strike out into the world...c'mon. I'm happy so far to focus on transit and eating. Inspire this!


First to mind is what I've come to refer as the Great Fiasco of China, the first full day there where we missed everything. After Lonely Planet was simply wrong about how long it would take to get to Simatai, a beautiful, crumbling, and more isolated area of the Great Wall, 2 hours from Beijing and 2 hours from the Wall, we had to backtrack to return in time for our train to Luoyang. We were in a pretty desolate area,

which this photo does not much capture the spirit of. It was an area of 4 lane highways and hotels that all seemed closed. Pretty quiet and it was only 3:30pm. Some people were hungry, and we went into the only thing that seemed open, a hotel restaurant. The staff were sitting around killing time, and it was obvious (confirmed after many hand actions and guide book flipping) that they were closed till 5.


However, after a long time trying to figure out where to go next (and quite embarrassingly for us, a waitress busted out a cellphone and called her English speaking friend to help us), a manager came down and forced the restaurant open an hour and a half early, just for us. I was red-faced, but the others refused my suggestion that we don't do this to the staff... "If they didn't wanna be open for us, they wouldn't", an argument that won the day, despite ignoring the simple fact that the staff had no choice. Without much of a moral backbone (just a general quesy feeling near all the time) I ate anyway. Using the guidebook I tried to tell the waitress that the food was delicious, but I think I just insulted her somehow. To assuage my guilt I thought we could leave a massive tip. I gave our 50% tip or so to the helpful waitress who outright refused. Thinking that she wasn't allowed but would appreciate it nonetheless, I slipped it among the dishes. We were halfway across the parking lot when another waitress came running out, money in hand, leading to a communication tug of war until we just walked away, winning the game of who gives away the money.




That was the same day we tried to get to Tianneman Square, but arrived right around its closing time. I didnt really know public squares could close, but there we were. Here's a shot at Tianneman Square, with the flash exposing the huge particles of pollution we were swallowing every second.


On my last day in China, I did get to Tianneman Square, the Forbidden City, and The Great Wall, which I will get into in a later post. But here is a happy faced and filthy man on that very same epic and victorious day, showing all signs of eight days of hard travel. He's about to enjoy some Peking Duck in a damn fancy restaurant (which would prefer not to be called 'damn fancy').

And here is a photo of me, defeated by the heaping quantities of Peking Duck I ate:

Which, as a vegetarian (a piscebyterian really) might show I'm really none at all. However, I feel no vague quesy guilt about it at all. Because I know I'll never eat Peking Duck again or have any plans to eat any other fowl for that matter. It wasn't a gateway drug back into the realm of morally depraved flesh eating, but just a radical choice. I dated a woman once, a vegetarian, who told me one time when no one was around, she ate a whole pepperoni tube (?), and I always considered that one peak of freedom. Anyway, the duck and duck soup was amazing.


After that, we went for a Lonely Planet bar called "C'est What?" that we couldnt find (whether that was our fault or Lonely Planet's I cant say), but found this guard outside the Forbidden City

looking like all the guards I saw. Except this one below, a guard off duty, just steps away from the upright specimen above.


A couple asked him to take photos of them in front of the Forbidden City south gates, and he got right into it, even getting them to pose in goofy ways, she on his back etc etc. If you enlarge the image, you can see a big tooth grin on his face. This little anecdote may not seem like much, but it was really striking around the intimidating Forbidden City/Tianneman Square section at night, with big police vans, cameras and serious and perfectly pressed guards keeping it all empty and controlled.

II. Xi'an

Soon after these coconuts, Ed and I, slowly and surely


found our way to one of Xi'an's Muslim Quarters for a street table dinner that was cooked by these guys

and had some exquisite and painful spice that made me chug down 4 orange sodas until I felt sick (and the beginning of the 4th I knew it was a mistake). Sated, we wandered around, Ed buying some Mao t-shirts that were much loved by some of the people we met climbing Mount Hua Shan.

We left the busier market area for quieter neighbourhood streets, a Jane Jacob dream of shops and residences, many in the same room.


Everything was great, and even felt a lot like Toronto, until, a left from the child pooing at the sidewalk (didnt see any diapers anywhere, just slits in the seat of pants so kids can just go where need be), it became darker, quieter, and thus more scary. So we went back to that best hostel in the world, exhausted but not sleepy, and got some Tiger beers at its Terracotta themed bar, thinking of how to make conversation with the two beautiful women at the table beside us, but some men swooped in and took them away. A Chinese guy played Elliott Smith songs over a beatboxing young whitey with a ponytail...we were in a hostel alright. Soon we were accosted by some friendly Australian English teachers and their dates, Steve and Nick and Cindy and Michael and someone else. The teachers were really fun, but prone to bragging not only of their 'incredible' jobs and their 'incredible' apartments, but also the 'incredible sluts' of Xi'an. This may make them out to be grotesque, but some 20 minutes later Steve got a call from his girlfriend and had to leave pronto. I liked that he was trying to impress us but he actually has a girlfriend he cares enough about to leave straight away from a night out. The beatboxing whitey named Andrew was one of their friends and and came over to chat. I'm now seriously considering going to work in China for a month after I finish in Japan, so I asked Andrew if I could find another job outside of teaching if I wanted to work and live in China.
"You can do anything you want man".
Thanks for the help Andrew.

III. The Best Restaurant in the World

This is in the best restaurant in the world. Its in Mengyuan.

The End...Part 3 Later.

158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo (flat sound on Zhong, rising tone for Guo) Part 1: IN TRANSIT

And I'm back from China. It was an immense trip, a massive trip, a tremendous trip and trying to put it down for you is daunting. So, White Stripes style, I'm just going to limit myself by dividing my transcriptions in into four broad categories, and see what rises to mind.

All in all, with all the inter-city trains and buses, Ed and I


spent 40 hours in transit. Which is not to include waiting around at trains stations and bus stations and bus stops, or any intra-city travelling like buses or taxis. Which leads me to the first great swoop of good fortune on the trip, Ed and I getting lost from the herd in Xi'an, a city 914 km south of Beijing.

We travelled with Maddie and Klara and met Maddie's brother Alexander in Beijing. The first full day there, on account of big group slowness, we actually accomplished nothing. No time for Great Big Wall, no time for Tianneman Square. I was one frustrated tourist. In Xi'an me and Ed jumped in one taxi and they for another, and luckily, oh so luckily our driver was lying when he said he knew where they hostel was.


With our giant packs Ed and I went in search, and after walking down the length of the street,


we found these children in a decaying courtyard


who explained that the hostel was closed.

Success! We checked into the best hostel in the world (free lockers, Terracotta Warrior Themed Bar, guitars and water and courtyard and birds and western toilets and free flip flops and free beers can you believe it), free of compromise and slow moving, and went to the Big Goose Pagoda, but more on that in a future, Sightseeing post.

The main radio pleasure of the taxi drivers in Xi'an, based on our limited sample, is choral classical music, which added a sense of the epic to a lot of my time in Xi'an.


We took hard seaters for the trains the whole trip,



rows of 2 or 3, often with sweaty cats trying to get edges of seats, or kneeling at our feet , warming our legs in the just bearable heat (that rhyming was all unintentional). People were everywhere, smoking by the toilets, lying on the floor, leaning against everything. Plus no toilet paper. It was near impossible for us to get any train tickets at all, me in a panic on our first night to get us to Xi'an in two days time, biking like the wind from the hostel to the Beijing Train Station some 4 blocks away.


It was a 4 day holiday in China centering around May Day, so Ed and I were often the only "old whiteys"* around the many Chinese tourists.


These hard seaters were terrible, especially when surrounded by old men who were quite unashamed to hork onto the ground at our feet and smack their lips for minutes after finishing their pastries. Old to middle aged men owned the trains, hanging around in the aisles in big gangs, talking loud, staring down old whiteys, and bumping past anyone in their way. They were the kids on the back of the bus. Happily, like smoking or horking, drinking is quite acceptable on the trains, which made those 12 hour overnighters much more bearable. In fact, we did meet some nice people on the trains, including this philosophy student who gave me an apple.

But no doubt, the best ride was Luoyang to Beijing, the night of May 3rd. Although there was only 9 seats in our row (3 vs 2, and 2 vs 2), we had, at the peak, 14 people around, and some curious onlookers enjoying our attempts to speak Mandarin and to shake off the Xi'an dialect we had spent learning the last 3 days. Our tickets were on opposite sides of the aisle, so with our common link we extended the party to both sides. Mostly students around with dapplings of old men, the one beside me never changing his expression from half lidded lucid eyes, and the old man in front of me with the most expressive smile because it would crackle open a thousand wrinkles on his wizened face. He woke me up at 6 am, still far from Beijing, either as a joke or to show me the sun rise. Also, around 3 when he saw me nodding off, he said, for all his buddies to hear, "cup of caffee" which apparently is the funniest thing in the world. Also in front of me was an engineer, and his wife, a pHD engineering candidate, who were great. To my right sharing my seat or standing up was Ping,


a music student who taught me how to make a paper boat, and told me many interesting stories. After a few hours, we all were very comfortable with each other, and even become quite intimate, an incredible thought considering we'll all never see each other again. As a teacher in Japan, I heard a lot about general Chinese dislike of Japan, and when I told Ping, quite truthfully, that I liked China more than Japan, she replied, "Ah, you are handsome and clever!" Which I didn't take too seriously, an instinct confirmed later when she asked how many people were in my family. "Oh, two sisters." "Ah, they are very pretty."

Sitting by Ed was probably the best couple in the world, a man working for the Environment Ministry in China who rubbed his girlfriend's feet, an architect student in Beijing. Despite his contribution to China's awful environmental policies, they were a lot of fun and the kind of couple that I find inspiring.


Finally, on one 5 hour bus trip, our driver honked his screaming horn loud and long as he passed every car on the road. After 2 hours of that madness, I grew comfortable with the rhythm and fell asleep, only to awake to noises of worry and trees directly out the front window. There I clenched my fists to face death in the certain tumble down a mountain side, but luckily it was only a truck carrying trees that we just avoided rear ending.


More soon.

*laowui - a term used by children for old whiteys like me and Ed..."lao + surname" is what you use for buddies who are older, "shao + surname" for buddies who are younger.

Ate Days

Tomorrow I'm off to China for 8 days, and I will return bearing stories.

This is a video made a month ago at a protest outside the Chinese embassy in Tokyo:

Coolie at the Station

Hanami Video!

Host with tha Most

What if I had a tv show?



I wrote a live review/interview for Soundproof Magazine in Toronto about this band, and while I was at it, I decided to make up a tv programme with the footage I had from this concert. I'm embarrassed by the way I come off, but not embarrassed enough not to show you.

Its rainy day and a train station caught fire and all the trains are down. Rather than get the day off, I just have to work later. AWESOME!