Holy mountains with fist fights
Our final days in Chengdu we decided to get active and headed off bright an early to climb Mt Qingchensan, a nearby holy Taoist mountain. Now when I say climb, I don’t really mean climb, more like walk. As with all Chinese tourist attractions, people don’t really want to have to work hard to do anything so the paved path up to the top also has a cable car running alongside. There is even speakers disguised as rocks so you can listen to the peaceful calming music all the way up!
To get there we took a taxi then a bus, then another bus which was packed with as many people as possible, walked a bit and arrived at the entrance, flashing our student cards for a sweet discount and into the mountain area. First though we had to get through the group of crazy women having a massive punch up at the entrance. Weird you say?Yes…very weird. Probably the strangest thing I have seen in all of China. I have no idea what is was about but something with an old lady fighting these younger women who worked there.It went on for about 30mins and was still going when we left with all sided throwing punches, spitting and kicking each other. No one tried to stop them, instead just crowded round to watch, and in cases getting stuck in making the whole thing this huge massive fight. None of the men stepped into stop them, they just yelled and argues with everyone else. Totally bizarre, eventually we left them to it and began our climb up the mountain.
It only took about 2.5 hours to get to the top, it it a sub-tropical area so very green and jungle-ly, temples are scattered on the way up which we went through to continue up wards. I’m not sure really what Taoism is, but it seems to have the yin and yang sign and gods that are similar to Buddhism around. The temples were pretty cool and made the way up interesting. The views were great a across the other hills, would have been a bit better if weren’t for the clouds which got thicker the higher we went and cut out all sense of being on a mountain top.
When we finally made it to the top, we found, a giant gold cow. Not what we expected but some sort of god I am sure, who knows really how they got it up the mountain?
(us at the top, the giant cow is inside the building behind us, pretty much is the size of the building)
We sped down hill the other way past a few shops and more temples and passed the empty lake before arriving back at the entrance.It was a beautiful walk and a great easy day trip from Chengdu. We stopped on route for some noodles then headed back to the city where we had the only bad meal in China. We listened to the waiters recommendation and ended up with pig snout soup and a fish soup, not so good and ended up being more expensive than anything else! so not so great.
The following day we were all leaving, Rdoc left at lunch time, I jumped on a Kunming bound train at 4 and Ross and Alice headed east somewhere in the evening. So it was the end of our little team and time for me to be really alone. The 20 hour train ride turned out to be great fun as the 5 Chinese people in my section where super friendly and we ended up drinking some horrible liquor all night, lots of beer and pigs ears (which I secretly put in the rubbish) they were so friendly with the help of the lovely Vivian, the only english speaker among them we had lots of fun silly games all night and of course taking about a hundred photos with me. The train was a lot flasher than the previous one so was a good night.
Everywhere I go Chinese people are just so friendly and never let you pay for anything! so good night, a long morning though until we finally finally pulled into to Kunming in the Yunnan Provence where I would spend the rest of my China time. I had decided as there was just so much to see in China I would travel a bit slower and just try see one place better rather than traveling too much. Yunnan is a great Provence with heaps to see, so it was good to be able to take it a bit slower round here for awhile rather than trying to cram too much in.
Tags: 1, blogsherpa, chengdu, China, quigchensan, taoism, TRAVELS 2008
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