On the second day, Ted decided to stay in town while I tackled Jin Ding on my own. Armed with an umbrella, a bottle of water and an iron will, I hopped into a mini-bus and was whisked away to the front gate of Wudangshan, bought the men piao (gate ticket), transferred into another bus, and was driven up to trailhead directly by a younger driver who was a little more careful about staying within the lines and making the journey a little easier on the stomachs of his passengers.
The mini-bus system is interesting. The drive from town to anywhere in the park costs 10 RMB. You start by hopping into a mini-bus in town, which fits about 6-10 people and takes you up to the front gate. At this point, you still haven’t paid anything. You then buy a ticket to get into the park (park residents pay nothing, an ID gets them in for free), and transfer onto another bus which is allowed into the park. This bus gets a receipt from a college-age girl in the parking lot that lists how many people it is carrying. About halfway to the first attraction, or about 15 minutes into the drive, the mini-bus comes across a checkpoint, at which the driver produces the receipt and each passenger is asked to pay (or not, for residents). The bus then proceeds further into the park. The process is similar in reverse on the way back into town. I figure that at some point there is a redistribution of money back to the drivers. This whole system struck me as being a particularly interesting example of economic coordination.
I reached the beginning of the trail at about 11 AM (late sleeper by default). A lot of people take the road further up to the lan che, the cable cars, which will take you up to the peak for a fee, and then they walk down the trail. That’s the wimpy way, and since I was looking to, as my friend Lu Tian said, tiaozhan ziji, to challenge myself, I started the three hour hike from the bottom, planning to take the cable cars down from the top to allow time for another temple or two. Like I said, the park has permanent residents: many of them are farmers, but many tend to the souvenir stands that dot the trail to the top. At the bottom, these are solid structures that double as houses and sell kitchy medals, back-scratchers, and towels. Further from the bottom, these shops disappear and are replaced by blankets spread out next to the trail offering tepid bottles of water (lifesavers, I must have drank five or six), orange-ade and soda, and snacks like cucumbers, hard candy and sunflower seeds. Near the peak are ladies and girls selling medicinal plants (fake, Tian claimed). In fact, nearly all of these items were sold by girls, women and elderly men. Where were the men? They could make more money serving as porters; some heckled tourists, trying to convince them to let themselves by carted up and down the hill for 100 RMB (3 hours of steep stairs, I would say it’s a fair price); others shouldered bamboo or wooden bars with sacks of sand hanging from each end and carried these up the hill to spots where concrete was needed for trail repair.
To Be Continued…
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Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan |
2004.08.17-23:34.00
Where was I? Ahh, Wudanshang. After the provincial museum and East Lake in Wuhan, the driver took us to Wuchang’s train station. We had a quick dinner of fried ou (lotus root) and Sprite, which I later regretted. Greast floating on warm soda is good going down, but not-so-good in the stomach. On the hard-sleeper to Wudangshan station, our tickets were for beds in separate compartments filled with those Chinese businessmen so lacking in distinguishing features that each slack-and-polo-shirt wearing, cellphone-case-on-the-belt toting man blends into the next. At about six in the morning, we were abruptly awakened and nearly thrown off the station as it rolled through the grandiose Wudansgshan station in a not so glorious village-turned-potential-boomtown. Fighting off the hawkers at the station’s edge, we headed downhill and booked a room in a nice place which just happened to be across the street from a mini-bus station. We had a little trouble with the shower: the hot water did not seem to be working. I called a fuwuyuan up to the room, and she took up a position on the squat toilet platform and turned on the shower (the water drains into a drain hole on the floor, hence the need for a little elevation). After a minute or so, she turned off the “hot” water and turned on the cold: behold, hot water. Since then, I’ve run across this same situation at two other hotels on our route. Is this some left-over from the Cultural Revolution, a la red-lights-mean-go?
Dinner that night was uneventful. Our grueling pace and sleeping on the train had done a job on Ted’s digestive system, so I ended up shouldering most of the job of putting down the food, which is usually an adventure when you don’t know exactly what you’re ordering.
The next morning, we headed up to Wudanshan itself, which is a large natural area covering several mountains and villages, hotels and taiji/wushu school, temples, lakes and mountain hideouts. The entry ticket cost 70 RMB (about 9 USD), enough to make me regret not realizing that we could have stayed at a hotel inside the park for a similar price and avoided paying the entrance fee on the second day. The drive up was on a very windy road, and Ted’s still testy stomach decided to send up an exploratory force; the driver seemed unconcerned about keeping his speed down, even when another one of the passengers also needed a plastic bag. Anyhow, Ted took a short nap, and then we spent a while exploring one of the first attraction in the park, an old Daoist temple. Its most memorable features were the large warrior god statues, the priests setting off fireworks outside the front gate, the tourist group of affluent Fujianese, the stone tablets commemorating donations (in Taiwanese and American dollars) from Taiwanese and Hong Kong devotees, and the large revolutionary slogans from the Cultural Revolution that had been painted over in red but were still visible on the outside of the largest temple structure (pictures forthcoming, these were pretty neat).
We walked across the parking lot to the road to find a ride up to the next trailhead, and Ted stopped at the little stand to buy a map and a bag of crackers. The family that runs the stand (four generations) ended up inviting me to lunch with them (fish, greens, pork, rice… delicious). The ladies run the store,and the husband drives a truck to town and back. It looked like they were dismantling an old unused part of the temple and shipping the (valuable?) bricks down into town to use in new buildings.
We caught a ride in a mini-van up to the next top parking lot, where the trail to the Golden Peak, Jin Ding, started. I impressed myself by arguing with the driver when he decided to charge us 5 RMB a person instead of 2 RMB. We tried to make our way as far down the trail as possible, but the oppresive heat, the grade of the incline, and reports that the peak was only three hours away convinced us to end our hike after only 30 minutes of walking. I ventured up a little further along the trail, but was caught by a light rainstorm, found shelter in a little cave, and then made my way back when the rain let up a little. Never mind the rain, though; by the time we got back to the trailhead, we noticed that the most popular souvenir among Chinese tourists (and readily available from most souvenir stands) was a towel to wipe away the sweat from one’s brow. We did as the Romans.
That evening back in town, I ducked into an internet bar while Ted went to bed early. Dinner was negligible, if I remember correctly.
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Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan |
2004.08.17-14:20.00
