Thoughts on China

The reason this is called “Part 1″ instead of “Day 1″ is that many impressions of Huangshan are built collectively over your stay here. Rather than give a narrative description of what I did in a timeline, I think that connecting ideas from the entire stay will work better. I hope you agree.

It’s really strange, Huangshan was so awesome, that even after the scams and bad information, I highly recommend it to anyone. As I mentioned, I had met a Scottish couple and we three made the trek together. The couple from Germany, that had made the reservations in Tunxi, went up on the cable car, while we walked up the Eastern route. Like Taishan, the first thing that strikes you about Chinese mountains that are famous is that the entire mountain has been made into a giant staircase! It is incredible the amount of work this must have taken. Like the Great Wall, it takes enough work just to climb the stairs, you simply can’t imagine how it could have been built. But since, unlike Egypt with the pyramids, China has 5000 years of continuous history, there are things being done even today that let us understand a little of how these amazing creations came to be…

Workers are still carrying up supplies to build hotels on the mountain the old fashioned way. It amazes me that they don’t use animals, like pack mules, but carry these incredible loads themselves.

OK, well, that explains how some of these loads got up the mountain, but there are steps that are built against sheer cliffs, like in this picture of my Scottish friends (note that this only gives you a small idea, in many places these are steps, not bridges, that wrap around the entire mountain without anyplace that would be an easy place to start):

Again, because they are doing this today, one place gave us a clue as to how this was done. A complete wooden scaffolding (i.e., staircase) is built, then the stone staircase is built with materials transported up this wooden bridge. I can only imagine how many people may have died in building the staircases…

Again, this picture doesn’t give you the feeling of how seemingly impossible this work must have been. Now that you’ve seen a small portion of one of the stairs and the only wooden staircase we saw that gives a clue how they were made, look at this picture and see if you can see the staircase wrapped around the mountain about three quarters of the way up:

It is really unimaginable how these workers without modern machinery have built these very sturdy structures on the sides of sheer cliffs!

I’m going to stop with that thought and continue with another thought in my next post.