A Journey to Well Known Places

Well, after my Tex Mex experience I packed a little bag, stored my big bag, and headed off to Mt Emei. It is the tallest of the Taoist/Buddist mountains and is populated with monks and monkeys. I spent the night at the base and boarded the bus to the top at 7am. Many heartier and more adventurous tourists of the western and chinese variety walked up the mountain. *I* was on vacation and had no intention of walking up a mountain. I walked around the top looking at the temples. I caught my first, and only, glimpse of monkeys at the top. After several hours I started my descent. At first I was pleasantly surprised because they entire path had been paved and stairs had been put in place. At the outset of my journey down there were chinese labourers with crude back packs carrying large paving stones or baskets of dry cement. They looked very heavy. Several hours later the endless stairs became tiresome, but still the labourers walked. They walked down steep stairs for hours, some of them doubled over with the weight. I was pretty glad I am a spoiled bourgeois intellectual. It took me three hours of unburdened walking to get to where they were taking the stones.

It only took me five hours to get tired. I stopped at a monastery and stayed the night. It was nice, if not a bit spartan. The next morning I started to walk down again and the rain started. I had to frequently get off the trail to make room for the horses carrying more paving stones and cement up the path. They looked like they were barely making it. Soaking wet and with aching calves I rounded a corner and spotted a cable car down. The cable car was exactly half way and I was not encouraged by the thought of another six hours of steps down. I thought I my friend Bill kicking rocks off a mountain path and saying ‘This is not a vacation. I would rather be in my cubicle working.’ I bought a ticket down.

Since that was early in the morning I spent the rest of the day visiting the worlds largest Buddha in Leshan. It is very large. I learned that it used to be the second largest Buddha until the Taliban blew the largest one up. They must have been very determined. This thing was over three stories high and carved into a cliff. I can’t imagine what the largest was like.

I returned to Chengdu and the very next day got up early again and headed for Chungquing to catch the boat for my Yangze river ‘cruise.’ I wouldn’t call it a cruise really. There was little luxurious about it, but the Three Gorges are actually very pretty. I took pictures, but they hardly do it justice. I spent three days floating the river and now I am trying to figure out how to get to Hong Kong.

I am in Wuhan now and the most prominent aspect of the city is its pernicious and prodigious mosquito population. I saw another museum with old pots and ax heads and a nice park. Very nice actually. On the main though, I don’t really like the city. There is not much redeeming about it.

Retraction: I talked to a younger chinese guy today and he said that in fact they are able to travel anywhere they want inside of the country. The whole thing about not being able to leave your province seems to be untrue, although he did confirm that passports are very difficult to get a hold of.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.