Climbing Mount Hua Shan
Trip Start
Aug 17, 2006
1
7
39
Trip End
Ongoing
Xianyang, China
Sunday, September 24, 2006
We've had another entertaining week, prob rather more
entertaining than usual, due to certain things.
We'll start with the electricity - one morning, at our
flat, we (as in we I mean me!) turned on a light
switch in the bathroom and BOOM - the light blew, ok
need a new light bulb - nope - no electricity in the
whole flat - bluddy great and on a teaching day too,
so no time to do owt. Eventually manage to persuade a
chinese teacher to come back to our flat at the end of
the day to have a look - and he cant find any problem
- even better! After 1/2 an hour of sitting on the
steps outside our flat - stomping every 2mins to turn
the staircase lights on - they are really bizare and
are sound sensitive - John comes back and we
eventually find that 4 out of the 5 fuses in the flat
have been tripped by 1 light bulb blowing - amazing,
but at least we got our electric back and only the ice
cream in the freezer suffered!!!! !
Now the mountain - well, on our days off we decided to
climb mount Hua Shan (also called danger mountain), we
had been told that there were some amazing sun rises
to be seen from the east peak, so we set off on weds
morn (get up at 6am on our day off - trust me it'll
get worse), we make it into Xian to get the number 1
bus to the mountain - about 2 hrs away - by 8.15am and
are on the bus on our way by 8.45, however, we didnt
envisage there being a crash on the highway, so we
were stood on the hard shoulder for at least an hour,
playing the name game (very entertaining when all the
chinese are watching you) whilst we waited for the
accident to be cleared ahead. So we eventually made
it to the mountain by 11.30 - only a tad later than we
had planned, then the hard work started. It was only
about a 6km walk, the 1st 4 being easy and the last 2
hard, so we set off - all steep up hill slopes - what
you expect, but rather draining in the mid day sun, we
reach 4km and look up and all we can see is quite
literally vertical steps upwards - oh how we grew to
love steps! At one point the steps were so steep that
you really were climbing vertically - quite hard to
describe, but ill email the pics soon hopefully. We
managed to reach the north peak before sun set and
watched it from there, then we cracked on in the dark
and walked to central peak where we stayed the night.
We all settled down in our 5bed dorm, and went off for
a peaceful nights sleep, or so we thought. We all got
woken up by Alex at 2am, whisper shouting "Hey Sean,
Sean theres a f*****g mouse in here, it just ran over
my f*****g head" to which Sean replyed, "I know, its
been running over me for the last hour!" That was the
end of the sleep as Tom says "I did feel something
lick my fingers" At 3am Sean says "I see it, by the
door its just run under Rachel's bed" Great! This led
to a 15 min torch hunt for the mouse by Tom Sean and
me - but we faliled to find it, so when the alarm
eventually went off at 5am, non of us were sad to be
leaving. To make matters even better, we found mouse
droppings in our beds - lovely!
So we walked the last hour up the mountain to the east
peak to watch the sun rise, which was really nice.
Once wed eaten breakfast we walked back to the north
peak, its true what they say, going down is actually
harder esp on such steep small steps, our legs were
all like jelly, but we escaped without injury. We
decided, because we had to teach in the eve to get the
cable car down from north peak to the bus. The views
from the mountain were amazing and words really cant
do it justice, so as soon as we get internet in our
appartment ill put some pics on the net. On the
electricity front, when we eventually got back to
Xianyang, we dropped the boys off at their flat - they
have a lift to get to the 13th floor and we went to
our flat on the 4th floor, we get into school for our
evening lesson - all freshened up from the mountain
and the boys are really annoyed, when the got home
there was no electricity in their block, so had to
walk up 13 flights of stairs and then get cold
showers, what a shame!
As for the look alike, we went our for a chinese girls
birthday to KTV (its massive over here) and there was
this guy, who wanted my number (no surprise
there!!!!!!) , but he was a Jory look alike (Dave
you'll have to keep this email to yourself!) and
Hannah, Tom , Sean and me all reckoned he was around
40 at best, when i asked how old he was the answer was
26!!!!!!!! Truely unbelievable, but he really was a
chinese version of Jory, I still cant believe how
alike they looked!
Anyway, sorry its so long, its been an eventful week,
hope everyone is having fun at home.
Lots of love
Rach xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
