Hiking

Today, I woke up late, had my breakfast and took off on a hike of epic proportions. I knew the trail was about 3 km long, with a rise of about 350 m (1100 ft), which is about twice the size of cranbrook hill. So, not too bad, I thought.

I started out my hike by getting lost around the hotel, and trying to break through the police perimeter in the process. Neither of those things were on purpose, but nevertheless, I ended up having to walk all the way around the hotel, which might not sound like that big a deal, but we're talking a huge hotel. I just checked, and it is a mile around the perimeter of the hotel, which I walked entirely.

Once I managed to get on the correct trail (after accidentally trying to break through a different secure perimeter), I found it to be quite beautiful. The path was entirely paved, and not with pavement, but with cemented stones. It was very pretty. There were nice flowers, running brooks, pools of water, and everything you might want on a hike (except for potable water, which I forgot to bring). However, as I advanced, I began to wonder exactly how this whole "mountain climbing" thing was going to happen, since the first kilometer or so of trail had an overall rise of about 50 feet. Then things started to pick up, but not very much.

Then suddenly, the trail got to the actual mountain, and things got intense. You see, unlike our uncivilized, unpaved trails back in Canada that have to wind their way up a steep incline, the Chinese just build stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. The last set of stairs was about 630 long, which at the conservative estimate of 15 stairs per floor, is equivalent to 42 stories of stairs. And that was just the last bit.

Actually it was not. The trail that I had taken so far only got me to the peak area; I was still a couple hundred feet lower than the peak itself. So, after buying some water and ice cream at the nice store, I attempted to walk up the next set of stairs. However, the park ranger told me no. Seeing as "yes" "no" "hello" and "thank you" were the only words we had in common in either language, I had no idea why this might be the case. Only after walking around the ring road (the peak had a ring road!) to a place where the lady also knew English numbers did I find out I had to pay an additional 5 yuan to climb to the summit, on top of the 5 I had paid to access the previous trail.

I set off, passed the tower where you could ring the very loud bell, and got to the top (where they had another store, of course). I took some excellent pictures, and rested for a while, as I was now very tired. The peak is at 382 m, the hotel at 26, the difference between which is just taller than the top floor of the empire state building. I compare it to a building, because EVERYTHING was stairs. Steep, stoney stairs. I then began my descent, and discovered that my legs were rather a lot like pool noodles at this point. I was hoping they didn't give out on me, as it would be a fairly long roll to the bottom of the stairs, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't end up OK at the end.

I dragged myself down the hill, and eventually made it back to the hotel. I must be getting old, because I found walking down hills (and stairs) to be vastly more tiring than walking up. I was actively relieved when there was a bit of the trail that was uphill towards the end.

So, I finally ran into Chinese bugs (which look like some weird combination of wasp and fly) and I also had my first encounter with a wild animal. It was a ferocious cat! And I don't mean like a leopard or something. No, I mean a house cat. But it was wild. And very scared of me. (Course I'd be scared of people too, if I were a cat in China).

I saw a lot of really awesome things today. In fact, I don't think I've seen so many picturesque, and photo-worthy things on my whole trip so far. UNFORTUNATELY, not only was my camera out of batteries, but I forgot my memory stick. So I could only take a few pictures before I ran out of space. So, here they are:



And here is a rough map of where I walked: All told it was about 7 km.