PTSD: Post Traumatic Stairs Disorder

So, in China, sometimes your students will invite you to go "climb a mountain" with them on the weekend.  Now to most outdoorsy Americans, this means clunky sneakers/boots, comfortable clothing, several bottles of water and granola bars tucked away in backpack, and hours walking up various inclines on dirt tracks through the trees with the chance for a great view and a lovely rest at the top.  In China, you still (usually) get that great view and rest, and you are walking through trees (or tree-like bamboo), but you are not on dirt paths.  You are walking up hundreds of thousands of stone steps.

STAIRS!

At first, this seems sort of nice--you don't need to don your unattractive hiking gear (and many Chinese women will tackle these trails in heels and high fashion), you don't have to worry about coming across a mud-pit because it rained the night before, and you don't have to worry about getting lost--you just follow the damn stairs.

Yeah, you know, because when I'm about to climb a damn mountain, imma wear my heels and my short skirt.  

But I am not exaggerating when I say hundreds of thousands of stairs.  On one incomparable summer epic, Liv and I found ourselves visiting the absolutely stunning Zhangjiajie National Forest Park.  The park is known for it's unique pillar-like mountains.  The park is situated within a large mountain range and features many natural wonders and truly stunning views.  Many of these mountain peaks can be reached by cable car, and we certainly took advantage of these cable cars whenever we could.  However, for the more athletic, you can also walk up the mountains via stairs.

Oh, and then there are these, for those that don't care about gravity and have complete faith in their fellow man.  For about 70 USD you could purchase the services of these guys, who would haul your ass up the mountain.  I'd like to think pride stopped me from purchasing this, but it was probably the lack of $70 and the fear of being thrown off a mountain. 

Our first part of the trip--after getting to the park from the city via bus-- involved a short cable ride up to Red Mountain.  We spent a leisurely morning walking about this mountain, looking out over really awesome views of misty mountain peaks.  We spent a couple of hours here before making our way back down the mountain (again via cable car) and (now that the mist had cleared up and the sun was out in full force) strolled along the bottom of these mountains.  A stream (the Golden Whip Stream according to our map) winds through this section of the park, and guests wade through the stream and enjoy a sedate, stair-less walk through the bottom of this mountain range.

Some slightly misty morning pics from Red Mountain

Look at all of this frolicking...surely nothing untoward could follow such joyous and incline-less fun?!

However, our gentle, meandering, cable-car filled trip was about to take a sudden and arduous turn.

After strolling along this stream and frolicking in the water a while, I was put in charge of the map, to figure out the best route for the next part of our journey.  Mistake.  Our map was an "English" Map, but the key was still in Chinese.  So I took a look at the map and noticed that there were two possible routes that eventually ended in our mountain hostel.  I noticed one was much longer and the other much shorter.  The shorter one also featured all the sights we wanted to see while in this park.  So, I directed us towards the beginning of this shorter, more interesting route.  Well, had I been able to read the key, or had I really stopped for two seconds and thought about the nature of maps, I might have realized that the short (and purple) route indicated an incline.  We climbed four kilometers of stairs.  It took us several hours to reach the top of Yuanjiajie from the Golden Whip Stream, where we started.   Most of this part of the climb was not interspersed with scenic areas, so it was mostly three straight hours of climbing--with bitching breaks (and doubled over panting breaks) about every 20 minutes.  I am not sure how Liv managed not to push me off the mountain; I was definitely not pleasant company.

I am sure you can see the differences between Liv on the stairs (left) and me on the stairs (center).  But that watermelon sure tasted like victory (right). 

However, when we reached the top of these mountains, it was absolutely stunning.  It was 1,000 percent worth the horrifying three hour StairMaster of Death that it took to reach this view.  Once we were at the top, there were more stairs, but there was also (finally) so much more to see.  We would climb for a few minutes, and then reach a plateau where you could look out over these really weird shaped mountains.  We reached this area in the middle of the afternoon and wandered about for a couple of hours, and took some seriously awesome late afternoon/sunset photos of these mountains.

Those Mountains, Though!!  Am I right?!

Finding our hostel that evening was somewhat of an adventure, mostly because we were both just so tired, we weren't really thinking straight.  We managed to finally locate a bus that would take us there, and it was not one of the most pleasant hostels we'd stayed at in China (although far from the worst).  It was in the mountains, so it was very damp.  The food was relatively bland.  Our bedrooms were very crowded and we had to pay extra for them to turn the air conditioning on--it wasn't that hot, but the humidity was awful.  But we were only there for a night, so it was altogether not too bad.  We passed out almost as soon as we go to our beds (I say almost because another guest wanted to practice his English by conversing for 40 minutes before we finally had to shut him down so we could sleep).  On the positive side, this hostel is where I met a gentleman by the name of Josh who told me all about Search Associates and is directly responsible for the direction in which my life is now headed. 

We met up with some fellow travelers, from Quebec, at this hostel and decided to take a scenic route down the mountain together.   While down the stairs is significantly easier than up the stairs, it does require a certain amount of balance and work.  Oh yeah, and my legs were twin stalks of muscle burning agony from the day before.  But again, the views were simply stunning.  And I have this thing about taking pictures of stairs--I just think they are cool, so at least photo opportunities abounded everywhere you looked.

Some scenes from Tianzi, the mountain we climbed down the next day.  In the center is Veronica, me, Valerie, and Liv. 

Once we reached the bottom of the mountain, Valerie and Veronica (our Canadian mountain climbers) suggested we get lunch and invited us to join them on seeing another scenic part of the park, Baofeng Lake, and we agreed.  We had lovely lunch and made our way over to the other side of the park.

Now, probably the worst part about the stairs from the day before (beyond being unending and upward) is that they are through mountains, and the path twists and turns constantly.  This means that you cannot see the end of your destination, so you have no idea how much longer you are going to be climbing those freaking stairs.  They just keep going.  When we reached Baofeng lake, after a brief walk up a slight incline, you reached a staircase.  A staircase that curved up around and disappeared.  A staircase that ended who-only-knows-when? Ten minutes? Ten miles? Ten days?!  I am not proud of my behavior upon seeing this staircase; I have never been so close to having a temper tantrum in my adult life.  My eyes welled, my face flushed, my lips quivered.  I told Liv I would climb it for a while, but if it just kept going, I would meet them at the entrance of the park.

So to the left would be the stairs of doom that just kept going up for god knows how long, but then we shortly went down a gain (center, left) a winding stair to the lake at the bottom. 

Luckily for me, and probably everyone that would have had to deal with me that day, the stairs were brief-- about 3 minutes--before we began going down again (and we went down a really cool staircase) and found this lovely little lake.  We boarded onto boats that took as on a much welcome, very relaxing circuit of this very pretty lake.  The entrance fee to this part of the park was an additional 70 yuan (on top of the 250 yuan it was to enter the national forest park) but it was totally worth it.  The cruise around the lake was a really great way to end our two day visit to this park.  And you know what?  A part of me almost wishes we stayed in the park one more day, because it was just so cool.  Although, at the time, I was glad to be turning my back on those stairs, and catching a bus back to Zhangjiajie City.

So pretty!

And we got to sit!  We got to sit!!!

For the rest of my stay in China, I treated stairs with a certain amount of wariness; I did not want to risk accidentally being on a staircase for several hours ever again.   When a friend of mine wanted to see a pagoda that was perched on the top of a hill in Hangzhou, I told her we would climb that hill for 40 minutes--no pagoda by the, no deal, and we would turn around head back down.  Never trust stairs. However, that being said, Zhangjiajie National Forest Park remains one of my favorite places, and favorite experiences, in China.

This is literally the best french fry I have ever eaten. 

And here's a quick video of a pan of some of these mountains.  I just can't get enough of them.