A lion statue called out to me as I neared. I felt its wet nose hard against my inner palm and then bent my head forward against its nose, holding onto his menacing fangs with both hands. I closed my eyes and its teeth became prison bars, the stone figure a barricade blocking my ability to move forward. I lifted my head and rested my chin on the statue’s snout. The drips beneath its chin soaked through my left pant leg.
“Ugghh,” I groaned and pushed off from the lion statue, patting his drenched side as I passed.
The others were about a dozen stairs above me and still climbing. Mom was standing to wait for me and catch her breath at the same time. Two steps, one more. Two steps, one more.
“For someone who hates hiking so much, you sure don’t show it!” I gasped between words.
“I don’t hate hiking. I love it. I just hate exercise for the sake of exercise,” Mom explained as she pushed on. “This is a long walk with beautiful scenery. It just kills me to be stuck in one spot on a treadmill. Yuck!” I’d often wondered how she stayed so slim through the years. I’m almost certain she’d never had a gym membership in her entire life, but then again, she’d been a gymnast like Bree back in her day.
Ammon was always far ahead of us, his longs legs allowing him to cover in one step what took us two or three. But at each bend in the stairway, he would stop and wait, ready to tell us more about what we were seeing.
“Did you know, Emei Shan literally means ‘Delicate Eyebrow Mountain’? Its name comes from two peaks that face each other and look like the delicate eyebrows of a classic Chinese beauty.”
“Yah, yah, yah,” I said, dying for oxygen. We’d been walking for seven solid hours, and the last thing I wanted to hear more about was this damn mountain. The few other tourists we’d seen on the trail were all domestic, and they somehow climbed those stairs dressed in suits and heels.
The natives of the holy mountain were very fit and active from carrying, not only the city folk, but also loads and loads of bricks. If they were not actually carrying things up and down, then they were trudging alongside their mules as they carried them. At one stretch, we seemed to pass by many of these quadrupeds. There was only one way up the mountain and parts of it were very awkward, steep, and/or slippery, which made me wonder how on earth those donkeys/horses/mules, or whatever the heck they were, got up here in the first place.
The steps were short and wide in some sections, steep and narrow in others, but in either case, they were never the perfect height or width to allow me to develop a steady stride. We were finding it hard enough just to walk the stairs, and they were making their poor animals carry very heavy loads. It just felt unnatural in every way.
At one point, there was no guard rail or even a fence to hang onto, so I was focusing on the ground, watching my mucky boots plod along up the mud-covered stairs. Just ahead of me, I saw the skinny hindquarters of a small, quivering horse bearing two wicker baskets bulging with red bricks. He looked totally squashed, and my heart hurt for him and the few others ahead. They’re struggling so hard to finish their day’s work to please their masters. I cringed as I saw that he was ready to collapse under the weight of his load, his dainty ankles trembling as he searched for each narrow, jagged step. It took all his strength to hold himself up. Rooting three legs to the earth, he’d struggle to find the next step with his fourth, scraping his hoof on the uneven stair.
“C’mon, let’s get around this guy. He’s not going to make it,” Mom said frankly as she picked up the pace. We hurriedly made our way past, expecting the worst.
“You really think he won’t?!” I asked.
“I really don’t know, but I do know that you can work a horse to death! If you push them hard enough, they’ll drop dead from exhaustion before they’ll give up,” Mom explained. That’s what I was seeing right before my eyes. He wasn’t going to stop. It was taking longer and longer for him to take each step. He foamed at the neck and beneath the straps of the baskets. My heart tensed. I didn’t think he could go another step, let alone the hundreds more to come, and I was watching when his legs buckled as his knees completely gave out, and he went tumbling down end over end.
We gasped as flecks of mud flew from the creases in his hooves as he fell down dozens of stairs in a full backwards somersault. Shouts from local men seemed timeless as his feet stretched high in the air and exposed his soft belly. He finally came to a halt by crashing into a tree.
The alarmed owner quickly ran down to unload the bricks. The horse looked like he was fading fast. We waited and worried and watched to see what would happen next, glad to be taking a breather ourselves. A little more than stunned, the poor horse eventually began to move. I was both amazed and concerned when he rolled over and hoisted himself back onto all fours, somehow righting himself even though he still had at least half the original load on his back.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The lighting hadn’t changed all day through the fog, but I knew it had to be getting late.
“A whole dang day and no monkeys!” I exclaimed, finally catching up to Ammon at the edge of a clearing.
“Well, I just saw one on the roof of that monastery,” Ammon said.
“What!!” I exclaimed. Rushing further into the clearing, I looked side to side and shouted, “Where? Where?”
“What? What?” Bree asked as she bounced around, not sure what she was looking for.
“It’s gone now. See? If you weren’t slacking all the time, you’d have seen it,” Ammon said. I glared at him and he laughed.
“Hey, look! It’s the horse,” Mom shouted and pointed as the tired animal actually crested the summit where our monastery was located. I was more than pleased that he’d made it; it meant I would be able to sleep that night.
“I hope they don’t make him work tomorrow!” Bree said.
“He deserves a vacation!” I agreed.
“Are you kidding me? If he’s lucky, he’ll get to work,” Ammon started, “Otherwise he’s just considered damaged goods, and they’d probably just retire him and then eat him.”
“That’s terrible!” Mom said.
“Why!? If he’s no use to them, why keep him?” he said. Is that really the mentality here? I didn’t want to think about that and went back to wondering what role the horse would play in my dreams that night.
Now that we’d reached our goal for that day, Ammon led us into the little wooden monastery which we knew had rooms to rent. He poked his head in, and his “Hello” and the ding of the doorbell echoed in the chamber-like entry. I crept in after him, inhaling the essence of this damp monastery nestled into the clearing halfway up the sacred mountain. We had visited several monasteries before, but this one made me feel like I had to tiptoe.
The floor boards creaking beneath our feet were followed by a sudden, “Ni hau.” What was usually offered as a light-hearted greeting sounded low and unusually haunting this time. The small head of a young woman whose slick, black hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail poked over the wooden counter.
“We are four people,” Ammon said, holding up four fingers.
She cocked her head like a little bird to see us, and then shook her head and almost shouted, “No! No!”
Hearing sighs of disbelief behind him, Ammon pushed on. “We need a dorm, please.”
She repeated herself, looking for all the world like a gasping goldfish trying to intimidate us with a big mouth. “Noooo! Nooo!” We were not daunted by a Chinese woman who only reached as high as Ammon’s belly button, and she seemed to realize the futility of disagreeing with his statement, because she then took out a paper that listed options for rooms.
“These aren’t what we want. I know you have more than just doubles.” There was nowhere else to go at this time of night, but I knew Ammon would choose sleeping on the ground and eating mud before he would pay the price of a double room. After putting up a bit of a fight, she caved in and offered a four-bed room, but Ammon still wasn’t satisfied. Going on the basis of the list of roo
m options posted on the wall ahead of us and his gut instincts, he pushed a little harder to get us a dorm. The “nooooes” kept coming, though, each time with more force, and her mouth soon resembled that of a whale more than a goldfish. Not knowing what else to do, Ammon finally broke down and echoed her persistent “noes” with “yeses” that mimicked her tone perfectly.
With a sour look on her face, she finally gave in, twisted around, grabbed a key off the wall, and signalled for us to follow her. It was as if Ammon had stumbled upon a secret code that somehow granted us entry.
“Geez, mareez!” Bree said, unable to make sense of most things that happened at the best of times. Keeping her distance, she silently lipped “nooooo, noooo,” with fish lips and the same wide eyes Ammon had used to impersonate the woman.
On the other side of a paper wall, monks sat cross-legged in a candle-lit room permeated with incense. Its smell was everywhere. As we walked past, I peeked in the doorway for a better view of the individual mounds of red robes that were lined up in such neat rows that they looked like a game of checkers.
We were escorted silently to a seven-bed dorm in a back corner of the monastery. Judging from the severe slope of the room and the bottomless view from the window, the room must have been literally dangling off the side of a cliff. The creaking floor boards did nothing to allay our fears that we might tumble over in the night. There was no place to buy food, so it was lucky we had brought our own bowls of instant noodles and incredibly sweet cookies.
The bathroom was nothing to be proud of, as we suspected. We only knew from the increasing intensity of the smell that we were on the right track as we took a long, creepy walk through the dark to get to it. Given that the monastery had no plumbing system, it was yet another hole in the ground with walls about knee-high. There were slopes inside the hole for the excrement to slide down and off the cliff, at least in theory. It didn’t work as well as they’d planned; very little actually slid down and off the cliff, and so much had piled up that it came up over the top of the hole. Charming!
It was much cooler at this altitude, so Bree and I huddled under some blankets around our tiny kettle on the floor to keep warm. We then stole blankets from the five empty dorm beds and slept in the same twin bed so our body heat would help us stay warm through the night. The room flickered with candlelight and smelled of burning wax throughout the icy night.
When I finally got my monkeys, I was reminded why we should always be careful what we ask for. Hordes of them swung in the trees outside our window in the dark, bouncing and running all over the roof and banging loudly enough to keep us up the whole night, or what little there was of it. Chanting monks woke us at four in the morning.
Their devotions echoed throughout the monastery. We listened as they repeated “Nanoo nanoo nee maa haaa” over and over again, and it was one of the most enchanting and wonderful sounds I’d ever heard. My reaction surprised me, as I would never before have understood its simple, calming beauty. I might even have derided it. I would never have listened to the sound of chanting monks sending off their prayers long enough to see it in a different light and appreciate its unique splendour. With no other option, I found myself falling sway to its undeniable grandeur. Twenty-odd voices blended into one melodious hum that came from deep within. The vibrations of their rhythmic chants penetrated my chest and soothed my mind as swirls of incense washed over me, and I felt wondrously weightless and free.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was raining when we started off the second day, and after only an hour I collapsed. Bree shouted, “Timber!” as I dropped my walking stick and hit the ground. I didn’t care that it was muddy and cold – I just wanted to rest.
A woman from one of the few “shops” we’d passed by began to laugh. It was clear she was immune to stairs, having walked up and down them every single day, probably her whole life long, to get to work.
“C’mon, Savannah. You can make it,” Mom encouraged.
“Just go away. I need a minute. Please. No more stairs.” I begged. I’m really not here. I’m down on the flat lands where it’s dry and wonderful. No stairs. I’m back in the guesthouse. I hoped if I lay there long enough picturing the places I wanted to be (which was almost anywhere in the world, as long as stairs weren’t involved), that it might just happen.
I opened my eyes and saw the bottom of Ammon’s mud-caked boots instead. “Don’t start quitting already. You’ve got a full day ahead of you!” Ammon said, stepping on my bum for good measure before walking on.
There is always a certain amount of peer pressure involved in being part of a group. The family was willing to wait periodically, but only for so long, and I owed it to them not to hold them up. I was totally outnumbered, and I could not just sit down and give up.
I thought I might rather die than lift my leg another two inches for another stair, but there was no help for it as far as I could see. I was trapped and began to feel stressed and coerced like that poor horse from yesterday.
Another man being carried went by. They almost stepped right on me, but even then, I could not bring myself to move. It was like being left behind in the mud and forgotten. I’d finally been thrown from my cushy, teen-princess throne and put in my place, and I didn’t like the feeling one little bit. Before I could break down completely, though, Bree poked me with her walking stick until I reached out and grasped it and held on tight as she pulled me to my feet. She sympathetically let me hook the crook of my walking stick to her backpack and helped drag me up. I was carrying only my small, day-trip backpack, but even that weight made the stairs feel higher and more unreachable.
Then I heard a hoot and a howl, and the bushes began to quake in the distance. The mountainside was bright green and glistening, covered with clumps of ferns and tree-strangling vines. We were completely surrounded by bamboo jungle, and as we leaned over the rail, we could see the tops of trees shaking off to the right. Like the famous scene from Jurassic Park, the trembling patches of dense foliage got closer and closer, and the hoots and calls grew sharper.
When the commotion reached us, we were finally treated to close-up interactions with the monkeys we’d been waiting to see – monkeys on the roof in the night didn’t count. From that point on, they were our ever-present companions, fighting and playing and swinging from branch to branch all around us.
Much like the Chinese, they were intrigued by this new group of bizarre, hairless white “monkeys.” They’d peer down their long, narrow noses to inspect us from the stairs. They plunked themselves down on the handrails or blocked the stairs completely, as if they had worked out the art of collecting road taxes. They scratched each other’s backs, breastfed their babies, and groomed each other’s dense, rain-streaked fur. We often gave in to their irresistible charms and fed them whatever food we were carrying, encouraging their begging behaviour. They walked up to us on their hind legs and took our offerings in their small, rubbery hands. Even fully grown, they were only about knee high. The baby monkeys had loose, naked skin on their faces that was replaced by red masks as they matured.
They reminded me of the raccoons in Vancouver that played havoc with our trash cans and occasionally got trapped in our house. Interacting with the monkeys gave me a sense of the achievement and satisfaction Ammon had referred to, and the energy to carry on.
Along the way, we caught up to a group of domestic tourists chasing the monkeys around with their cameras. It was drizzling lightly, and a few tourists wore plastic bags on their heads to keep dry. One daring monkey leapt out from where he’d been lurking in the shadows of the underbrush onto a woman’s back and balanced his feet on her shoulders. As she ducked her head and spun in circles shrieking, he tried to pry the plastic bag from her head. A man who was apparently the woman’s boyfriend tried to pull the crazed monkey off her as she began to cry, terrified and hysterical, and kept holding onto her head and the plastic. The monkey continued to yank at it and crawl all over her, completely dominating the situation. Just give him
the bag! I wanted to shout, but I knew they wouldn’t understand me.
“What do you expect if you wear a bag on your head!?” Mom laughed. “I guess they didn’t see the signs.”
“He’s not getting any after that performance!” Ammon joked, watching the boyfriend get slapped across the face by the hairy troublemaker.
“You couldn’t even save me from a stupid MONKEY!!!” Bree imitated what she expected the woman might well be saying that night.
But the show was soon over, and Bree and I dragged ourselves ever higher, again asking why on earth we were doing this. Mom pushed us through fog thick enough to chew. Despite knowing there would be no view, her determination forced us to climb for the last hour to get to the summit. When we finally reached the finish line, I could hardly see my own outstretched hand, let alone the big golden temple that was supposed to be on top.
I could barely see Mom beside me but I realized, despite my fury, that it would have been even worse had we paid a hundred dollars to be carried up. Then it slowly dawned on me that, even if it had been a clear day, this was about far more than just the view. It wasn’t reaching the top that made it so precious. It was experiencing it, breathing it, even cursing it a little (okay, okay, so maybe a lot) along the way. That journey helped me climb not only the physical stairs but the symbolic ones in my life. It was about setting a goal and accomplishing it, no matter what. I learned the boundaries of my own strengths and weaknesses, and then how to move beyond them.
Somewhere beside me, Bree’s half-crazed laughing reminded me that we were a team, and that a team effort had got us there. When I’d dropped my walking stick and fell to the ground, with the locals snickering and cold, wet mud on my face, they were the ones who got me back on my feet. Being in a situation where failing or giving up is not an option, you reach limits you didn’t think you could and begin to believe that anything is possible. Trips like that increased my confidence in my abilities and in myself.
Chapter 26: Postcard
Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set Page 105
