Upstairs, Downstairs

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”

Having fully recovered from our brush with Tibet, we decided to go ‘active’ for a while and headed for Emei Shan. One of China’s four holy mountains, the peak is 3047m high and is considered a necessary pilgrimage for many Chinese Buddhists. For some devout followers, climbing Emei Shan involves bowing with their heads to the ground after every 3 paces; for most visitors, however, taking a bus and cable car to the summit, and taking the bus back down again, is a more than adequate expression of faith.

The whole mountain is a giant staircase, with old craggy stone steps on the ‘long way round’ and newer concrete ones on the other, steeper, side. At intervals along the way are ancient monasteries, with names like ‘Magic Peak’ and ‘Elephant Bathing Pool’, where you can stay and rest overnight for a few dollars, and where large families of monkeys terrorize tourists with food or valuables. Starting at the steep side’s Wannian Temple we, along with hundreds of other people, began our trek upstairs. After the first hour of walking in the heat, Jonny, predictably, had turned into his ‘amazing melting man’ alter ego. I was reminded of the sign at Covent Garden station that says, ‘this emergency exit has 124 steps. Do not attempt unless in an emergency’; climbing this mountain would be no easy feat for these two Londoners. We took it, quite literally, one step at a time. A few hours and hundreds, if not thousands, of steps later we stopped for lunch, where we met an American guy, Jimmy, and another English couple, Pat and Nic, who walked at a similarly snail-like pace to us. We continued the climb together, which thankfully took our minds off the task.


It’s every pilgrim’s (and by this point, we definitely felt like pilgrims) wish to make it to the Golden Summit for sunrise on Emei Shan. Up there, magical things happen, like ‘Buddha’s Aureola’, a natural phenomenon where your own shadow becomes tinged by a rainbow, and when monks have been known to jump off the cliff believing they’ve been granted early nirvana. A bed would be good enough for us, mind you: we were determined to make it to the top before nightfall.

Nine hours after we began the trek, our five completely exhausted bodies somehow reached the top cable car station. Here you could get a lift to the last section of stairs and a hotel for the night and a further hour’s walk to get to the ‘Golden Summit’. Our relief soon turned to horror, as we realised we’d missed the last cable car of the day. As we pondered the prospect of a 3am rise and a two-hour morning walk to the summit, two Chinese ladies shouted down from the cable car station. Jonny somehow translated, “another cable car…going now!” Every last vestige of energy we had was spent running up the (yet more!) steps to the cable car station, carried only by a huge sense of elation that we would, after all, see the sunrise. At 4.30am, we woke up for the last hour of walking to the summit. It was pitch black, so foggy you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and raining.


We had no idea how to get there, but knew we had to look out for a giant golden statue comprising four elephants and three Buddhas. Ten minutes later, we stumbled across a strange, marble plateaux, with steps and a sign saying ‘best place for Golden Summit photograph’. Surely this couldn’t already be it? We had no idea – it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything at all. We decided to stay put. Even if we weren’t right at the top, we would be in a good place to see the sunrise. When the light came, we were standing at the bottom of the biggest golden statue I have ever seen. There were crowds of people lining the plateaux and three temples of Bronze, silver and gold. At 6am, the sun poked its head above the clouds to a resounding cheer. We’d done it.


Or had we? If we thought the climb up was hard, nothing could have prepared us for the walk down again. Deciding to take the long way round, as it was more picturesque, the first hour of walking down wasn’t too bad. And then my knees began to really hurt. By 5.30pm we still had 2 hours of walking to go, and only one and a half hours of daylight. Despite the very real pain, we all quickened our pace to an, ‘almost-run’, singing songs and eating large amounts of chocolate to keep us going. Twenty minutes before we reached the bottom, the heavens opened and proper, torrential rain soaked us from head to foot. We didn’t care though: at least we’d make it back for beers in the hostel.

Emei Shan. One to remember.