Anyway, the trip was fantastic. We took the hard seat train there and back, which was an experience! Many people asked their seat neighbor why us white people weren’t just taking an airplane. After a 14 hour overnight trip, we found ourselves in Huayin City (that’s just a name. whether it actually was a city is another story). Huayin City is another one of those cities cursed by China’s construction subsidies. The city is still very rural, with corn being laid out on the roads to dry, but it has the feel of a modern city with highrises everywhere. This, combined with the air pollution, made for an eerie empty city, not unlike something out of the Twilight Zone. Since we were all exhausted, we just ate some dinner and went to bed.
The next morning, we headed off to see Huashan (华山, or Mountain Hua). Huashan is famous for being one of the most dangerous mountains in China, with extremely unsafe conditions, and it did not disappoint us! After a gondola ride to the top, we realized that most of the barriers preventing people from falling off the mountain were just chains that came up to our knees (remember, the Chinese people are tiny. To them, those chains went up to their waists!). Canlong Ridge, which is the only way up to the other peaks, is a one way path up, on a ridge. Usually, trails will avoid ridges because of how prone people are to falling off, but of course they don’t give a shit about that here. It was harrowing, but fun! The rest of the time was spent hiking around the 3 peaks, before we had to catch the gondola back down and get our train to Xi’an.
Once we got to Xi’an, we caught another train to a town called Tianshui (天水, or literally, Heavenly Water). Tianshui is an adorable town in Gansu province, which I’ll definitely write more about later. Anyway, many people I chatted with in Tianshui claimed that it was a tiny town, and really had nothing to see. I had yet to research Tianshui’s population, so I was imagining the population to be about 50 thousand people. After I got home and looked it up, I realized that the population was 3 million people, three times the population of San Diego, the 8th biggest city in America. This blew my mind! A city with 3 million people is HUGE to me, but these people were claiming that it was such a small town.
Anyway, we spent the first day just wandering around Tianshui, and taking in the sights and chatting with people. There are many Chinese Muslim people (回民), so there were quite a few mosques and many lamb dumpling restaurants. That night, we all went out to a local bar, and had some fun drinking. This group of Chinese people called me over and we chatted all night. They said I looked like Harry Potter!
The next day, a couple of friends and I headed over to Maijishan (麦积山), which is famous for having these Buddhas and bodhisattvas carved into the mountain. It wasn’t as harrowing as Huashan, but it was much more idyllic. There were villages among the forest, and it was easy to imagine the air pollution as those pretty clouds that you see up in the mountains.
We returned and then headed back to Beijing, where the very next day, I started my first day of work! I’ll write more about this tomorrow.
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