Emei Shan (Mount Emei), 130 km southwest of Chengdu, is one of the four famous Buddhist mountains of China. Temples, statues and monasteries housing thousands of monks were established here from the 14th century. Only a few monks remain here today, but there are many buildings still in use at the peak and on the mountainsides. This place remains an important place of pilgrimage for Chinese Buddhists and it also reputedly has fantastic walking trails and scenery which are what brought us here.
Emei Shan is a steep mountain with a steep concrete staircase built into the mountainside and that reaches through the mist to the very peak at 10,100 feet. Tens of thousands of pilgrims and visitors struggle up here every year. But there is a more recent, much easier way to the top. It’s now possible to catch a bus 80% of the way, then a cable car, then a short walk. This is the way we chose (although we did foolishly decide to walk back down which took a day and a half and was actually much harder on our knees than walking up would have been).
We made our ascent in the cable car on Tuesday afternoon after a brisk half-hour walk up from the bus stop. It was the mother of all cable cars; the registration plate inside the compartment stated that it could carry up to 7 tonnes of humans (or a maximum of 100 units). This was about the number of rowdy excited passengers in our car slung below several thick steel cables (I wish the Chinese wouldn’t call these conveyances “ropeways”). At the top we all spilled out into the cold air, and to the strains of Buddhist temple music and energetic spitting by the many aerobically-challenged cigarette smokers, we made our way up the steps to the Golden Summit Temple and the cliff lookouts that are permanently bathed in mist that rises from the subtropical rainforest below. We checked out the fantastic sights at the top, then checked into one of the two hotels just below the peak. The room was basic but quite adequate, particularly considering where we were.
We were in bed by 8pm as we intended to rise before dawn to see the morning sun appear above the mist layer. We didn’t have an alarm clock (we threw that away a year ago), but we were awoken early by an army of visitors preparing to greet the dawn. We got up half an hour later to discover that it was still only 5am! A large crowd including us was soon gathered at the fences that snaked along the cliff tops and the sun eventually deigned to make an appearance. But it was a bit of an anti-climax. This was not a morning when the sun rose majestically above a thick white layer of horizontal cloud to create the beautiful scene that graces the tourist literature for Emei Shan. But it was pleasant all the same.
By 7.30am we were on our way down the mountain, hoping optimistically to complete the descent in a single day. We passed Elephant Bathing Pool mid-morning and stopped for lunch at Magic Peak Monastery. But the first several thousand steps had already begun to take their toll and pain had set in. Things got much worse after lunch when we encountered the steepest part of the descent and our too-old-for-this knees began to wobble and then collapse under us. Sedan chair porters move up and down the staircase, spruiking for fare-paying passengers to ride on a hessian seat slung beneath two bamboo poles supported by a wiry man at each end. Like lions circling an injured zebra, they are expert at identifying walkers about to drop but who are attempting to hide the fact, and they shadowed us for kilometres, showering us with good-natured jibes along the lines of “you shouldn’t be doing this to your knees” and “if you carry on injured like that, you’ll suffer permanent damage” and “the track gets even steeper around the next bend” etc etc. But we were determined to avoid the ignominy of the sedan chair, viewing it as one does a hospital bed pan – the Absolute Last Resort – and we weren’t at that stage yet (though not far from it). A second reason was that we each knew that if we were the first to drop, the other would sneakily snap a photo and publish it on the Blog. So we both sweated and hobbled on in agony with each step taking much longer than originally anticipated.
More...At 5.30pm, after 10 hours of climbing down steps, we came to Venerable Trees Terrace. But still several hours from the bottom of the mountain and with nightfall approaching, it was obvious that we could not continue. So we booked into a lodging hall fortunately located at Venerable Trees, and after a quick wipe down with a wet cloth (to avoid joining the long queue of people waiting to use the communal showers and toilet), and a bowl of instant noodles, we turned off the light and collapsed into bed. Not even the warm humid air or the electrical storm raging around the Pavilion could keep us awake.
We were up and on our way again at 6.30 am in the morning, eager to test out our knees after a good night’s sleep and to avoid the heat and humidity that would come later. We were still in pain, but with the aid of walking sticks we bought at the Hard Wok Café where we had breakfast, we found that we could continue albeit very slowly. Fortunately, after about an hour, the track grade reduced considerably and it became easier to move forward. We passed through the handsome Pure Sound Pavilion, and late in the morning we emerged from the final valley. The vehicle horns in the distance never sounded so sweet. Not long after, we hobbled into the Wu Xian Gang Bus Station at the mountain base and using the last thread of connected knee ligament, we grimaced up the steps of the bus with a gait that had we been playing charades, the correct answer would have been “Call an ambulance quick”. The other passengers found this an amusing sight, but I reasoned that they were a tour group getting ready to ascend the mountain and they had little idea of the ordeal awaiting them (at least I think they must have been getting ready to ascend – they all looked far too happy and pain-free to have just completed the descent).
The scenery at the peak of Emei Shan and around Pure Sound Pavilion was indeed very beautiful, and there were many great sights along the way notwithstanding the approximately 15,000 steps that needed to be traversed on the 30km trail. One also had to be wary of thieves. Not humans but bands of macaque monkeys which block the path and extort tolls in the form of food to allow pilgrims to pass. Apparently they can’t abide stinginess, but I found that my walking stick doubled as a most effective dispenser of discipline to these furry robbers, with the result that they seemed only too happy for us to move through unhindered and toll-free. Several of them even appeared to form a guard of honour after I demonstrated to one of them what viciousness a tired grouch with throbbing knees and a walking stick was capable of.
Another surprising sight on the trail was the number of elderly pilgrims, particularly women, well into their eighties determinedly making their way up the staircase towards the invisible mountain peak shrouded in the mist above. They were tough! But the ultimate respect for toughness must go to the wiry men inching and wincing up the staircase with loads of bricks on their backs, and a few who even carried concrete beams across their shoulders! They were truly awesome and provided a living answer to the mystery of how on earth the Great Wall of China could have been built. Just before noon on Thursday we arrived back at the very nice Teddy Bear Hotel in Baoguo Village where we had stayed a night and left our heaviest belongings in storage before tackling the mountain. After a quick shower we fell onto the bed, not moving for hours to allow our knees to begin healing. We thought Zhangjiajie was a tough walk but it’s a picnic compared with Emei Shan. Both are worth every step though. |  |  |
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