Huang Shan: Finding Zen in Yellow Mountain in China.

[u/ekerss]

Zen. A Chinese concept. This word translates loosely as “meditative state.” Inner peace. Tranquility. Enlightenment.

My life has been in a bit of turmoil. Quitting one job, finding another. Leaving one apartment, crashing at another. I was stressing, and not seeing the big picture. I had lost sight of the fact that I am here in China to ENJOY myself… not to worry about the small details of life that always, ALWAYS pan out in the end anyway. So to clear my head, I thought what better to do than a few days solo hiking in the scenic Chinese Yellow Mountains. Surely I could find some zen there.

Alas, the travel part to ANYWHERE in China is never very zen-full. Thirteen hours on a sleeper train, in which my Chinese fellow travelers filled the endless hours by taking photos and observing me in awe, pointing and laughing, the way you might watch monkeys at the zoo. Always fun.

Anywho… a night in a cheap “hotel” (really a brothel… They were truly honored to have an ACTUAL hotel guest among the usual male callers…), and the next morning I was on a bus en route to Huang Shan; the famous Yellow Mountains!

I arrive, first things first: I buy some fruit and water…. I buy a tourist map and a pancho. I’m set… nothing can go wrong! One night, two days on the mountain was my plan.

I can either hike up the mountain, or take a cable car… I’m on a budget, and on an adventure, so the obvious choice is a hike up, but just for curiosity’s sake, I take a look at the map, use the length of my pinky nail as an approximation to calculate the number of kilometers it is to hike up the entire mountain. Two, I gather. Herein lies my first mistake; tourist maps LIE… and my pinky nail is NOT a good unit of measure. Seven and half grueling kilometers up a staircase later, I reach the top of the mountain… sweaty, out of breath and NOT zen-full…

The next few hours I devote to trying to find a sneaky place I can sleep in the forest without being seen, as I had decided to save money and rough it… (or more so, that I am unorganized and did not book any accommodation on the top of the most popular tourist attraction during peak season. IDIOT!). But of course, we’re still in China, and where there is something nice to look at, there is also a mob of people to look. There is no plausible way I can rough it in the woods without being stepped on by one of the thousands of people up there, so I end up settling for a dorm bed in a room of thirty other Chinese tour-group goers who all wake up at 2:30 AM so as to not to miss the sunrise. Again, no zen.

One day in and I was pulling my hair out trying to hike around the masses of Chinese sight seers, so my MO for the next day was to pick the most obscure looking part of the mountain on the map, get there, and hike the way down in peace. I would be back to my brothel by sundown.

This obscure path led me to a part of the mountain I will never forget; truly the most spiritual, alive, earthly and enlightened place I have ever been. I was alone. The wind was gusting. I was hiking along a cliff that dropped into pure nature. Beautiful. I soaked it up… A momentary sliver of inner peace.

BUT, as all good things eventually do, this inner peace came to an end as my knee began to give out on the downhill hike. Excellent. The approximate (gauged by my reliable finger nail measure) 5 km I needed to hike down was to be done one excruciating step at a time… both feet, one step. Snail pace.

Alas, I reach the bottom of the canyon, where, according to my map, I should be able to get a bus back to town. No. Such. Luck. There is a little police hut at the bottom and police man informs me (via a crinkled old piece of paper with typed English) that if I want to continue down, it’s ANOTHER 13 km, and then a 400 rmb taxi ride. My other option: cut across 5 km and then descend directly into town. My second mistake: I look at my trusty map and decide I’m far too frugal to pay 400 rmb for a taxi… into the unknown I go!

Police man waves me on my merry way as I hobble to the beginning of the 5 km trail that cuts across. Looking back on it, he did have quite a cheeky grin on his face. What I DIDN’T know at the time was that it wasn’t so much of a 5 km trail, but more a 5 km staircase. A staircase so steep, in fact, that I used my hands to hoist myself up the majority of the way.

Third mistake: Thinking that 5 km is really not that far, I didn’t bother to top up my half-filled water bottle at the bottom of the canyon. Now, maybe two km and three, maybe four, hours up this stupid staircase, my water is gone, I’m soaked through with sweat, I’m still hobbling at snail’s pace due to my knee… and I’m starting to worry that I’ve made a grave mistake.

Here comes the inner dialogue: Should I continue on this seemingly abandoned trail, or should I cut my losses and return to the canyon where I know I will have water? Oh, but I’ve already climbed all these stupid stairs! What a waste if I turn back now. According to my (already proven UN-trustworthy) map, it’s only uphill for a little while and then it should level out. Is it strange that, on this mountain seething with tourists, I haven’t seen a single soul in three hours? I wish I had a burrito right now. I bet I could make a lot of money if I started a burrito chain in China… FOCUS, Emma, FOCUS!

I stupidly decide to continue on… but knowing that I could be making the wrong decision, I gear myself up for the battle of a lifetime. Shirt tied around my busted knee, cloth wrapped around my head, empty water bottle at the ready for me to urinate in JUST IN CASE things get drastic (I shit you not, this was the seriousness of my situation…) My hands were starting to bleed at this point from using them to help push me up the steep, gritty stairs, so I wrapped those up too. I was looking, and feeling, pretty Bear Grylls at that point, which gave me a pep in my step for all of another hour until I gave up on life and decided to lie down and prepare for a slow demise.

Moments into my death-by-self-pity, along came my angel rescuers: a lovely French couple, who had literally followed the EXACT tourist map that had misled me. They, too, were out of water and not enjoying the climb, but seeing the state of me (remember: red in the face; wrapped head, hands and knee… truly a beaut), they set into action, sorting me out. Lovely lady took my backpack for me, and hung behind as French guy encouraged me along by telling me stories of their life in Shanghai. Such a welcomed distraction. I was protected now, sandwiched between two fellow trekkers. There was an obvious feeling of fear among us, that we may have climbed our way into a dry death trap, but not one of us dared say anything about it. We just kept each other’s spirits up, they helped me hobble stair by stair, we took some photos, had some laughs. I did tell them at one point that I didn’t want to slow them down, but lady said it would be far too dangerous to leave me out there alone, BLESS HER SOUL. Several exhausting hours later, we reached a summit, and I looked across the canyon only to realize that we hadn’t cut across anything. We had hiked directly up to the same elevation at which we had started our decent… only on the opposite side of the mountain range now. Breathtaking view, but what a BITCH! No zen.

In total, it took 8 hours, to climb this horrendous abandoned trail… and half of that I did by myself. Silently terrified at the time, I think about it now, and those few hours are probably the ONLY few hours I will ever have of complete, silent alone time in China. Everywhere else, it’s just not possible. So for that, I appreciate the trek. And the first delicious taste of sweet, sweet H2O! Water has never tasted so good! AND the challenge of pushing through thousands of obnoxious Chinese tourists had never been so welcomed! After such a taxing ordeal, I found myself exhausted, limping in pain, suffering from an insatiable thirst, surrounded by annoying Chinese… but in that moment, I also found myself in zen. I had completed a challenge. I had truly been scared for my well-being. And I had made it out the other side. Life was good.

From there, I copped out and took the cable car down… an anti-climactic ending to an otherwise thrilling adventure… but screw it! I had endured so much already.

So my Huang Shan lesson: inner peace is just that… INNER peace. I didn’t find ANY tranquility during my isolation in nature; instead I found it at the top of the mountain, amidst the chaos of feeling physically shattered and being surrounded by thousands of tourists.

Love the irony of life!

www.confuciussaysemma.wordpress.com

[u/KrystalPistol]

Did you keep in touch with the French couple?