| Andrew Gramling taught English in China for a year. China Dispatch is a detailed recollection of his experience that enriched both his life and those of others he met and befriended in that country. This is the eighth installment of his China journal. A couple of days after going to Tian Zhu Shan, Nathan, Summer, Jane, and I took a bus to go to another mountain called Huangshan, also known as Yellow Mountain, about three hours from Anqing. Nathan had heard about the mountain before, and had been pushing for us to go there since our vacation started. After we arrived there one hot and cloudy afternoon, we found a hotel that was in a small city near the base of the mountain. The city looked quite deserted compared to every other place I had seen so far in China. Through the hotel, we were able to hire a driver to take us to see several sites in the area. First we went to a lookout point near the mountain where people come to see monkeys in their natural habitat. After we arrived, the man who worked there started making noises to summon the monkeys from out of the nearby forest. Up the hillside, we could see trees and bushes begin to shake and sway from side to side in a straight line heading directly toward us. Then a family of monkeys appeared coming out of the trees at the bottom of the hill crossing a little stream and a small grass field to see who was calling for them. There were about 10 monkeys with dilapidated gray hair and hazel eyes. Some of them were old, and some were very young latching around their mothers hanging from the underside as their mothers crawled around on four legs. There was also a young leader who was constantly running around putting the other monkeys in check. After he was satisfied that he was still in charge, he came up to the pavilion and crawled up over the side where the wildlife expert stood with a hand full of uncooked corn kernels. He told Summer and Jane that we should not look directly into the monkey's eyes or there would be a hostile reaction. The monkey sat down on a wooden rail next to him, and reached into his hand to pull out some corn kernels and started crunching down on them. Several of us took pictures posing next to the monkey while he was occupied by his meal. I took some corn kernels and prepared to feed them to the monkey, but made the mistake of making eye contact with him. His pupils were very acute indicating that he had excellent observational skills and was very intelligent, but his eyes intensified with anger as our eyes locked for no more than a few seconds. He started making hostile noises and tried to urinate on me, but luckily he missed. Then he jumped over the side of the rail and ran back to his family, looking back up at me like he was thinking, "Don't let me catch you coming through the trees at nighttime!" About 15 miles away from the city we were staying in was an ancient city that was filmed in the movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon". Our driver dropped us off in a parking lot in front of the city where we took a stone pathway surrounded by ponds full of vegetation on both sides to enter through the front gate. People still lived there in old buildings no higher than two stories whose structures appeared to have been preserved since the city was first built. The inhabitants of the ancient city conducted their businesses in some of the buildings and at stands that were designed to make money from tourists. In the central marketplace, I sat down with some people who were selling many different kinds of tea underneath a tarp while the others were searching the buildings for clothing. None of the tea vendors could communicate with me, but they were very happy to allow me to sample some of their different tea flavors. Some of the teas they sold looked like little rocks, but produced flavor just as tea leaves did. In that area, they produce some of the most expensive teas in China. After we left the city, we went to a place in the Huangshan Mountain area where we went rafting in a circular stream of water. It was very shallow and rocky, so some of the men who worked there followed us downstream and stood nearby ready to assist us whenever we got stuck. Huangshan Mountain is known as the most famous mountain in China. There is a popular lookout point at the top of the mountain where people like to come to watch the sunrise. The pathway up the mountain was divided into stairs for hikers, and a small pathway that ran parallel to the stairs for servicemen to carry supplies up and down the mountain. Somewhere at the top of the mountain, after climbing two-and-a-half hours worth of stairs through the forested mountainside, we came to a large four-star hotel. But we decided to stay in small dorms across from the hotel since it was much cheaper. As the sun was setting, many other hikers were walking from the hotel to restaurants and stores that were on top of the mountain while trying to re-cooperate from their arduous task of hiking earlier that day. There was a basketball court and other sit down areas where people could relax and enjoy themselves between the hotel and the dorms. I couldn't believe that all of this existed on top of a mountain. There was even a banking machine where Nathan accidentally picked up a counterfeit bill that was supposed to be worth 100 yuan. Counterfeit money seemed to be a little common in China. Store owners, taxi drivers, and workers of every kind would thoroughly examine any bill they received worth more than 50 yuan to make sure they weren't getting cheated. Summer began to overcome her shyness of me while we were at Huangshan, but her innate sporadic behavior never changed. She went off by herself to go hiking for a couple of hours, and Nathan checked into his bunk bed to have a short rest. While Jane and I were sitting alone on a concrete bench in front of the hotel, with all of the other hikers recreating around us, she told me that she thought Summer and I were a match for each other. I didn't know what kind of match she meant, but as time went on, it became obvious to me that we were a match of complete opposites. She was a complete extrovert, while I leaned a little more toward the introvert side, though I could be quite extroverted at times. She was always running around from person to person engaging in light conversation while I mostly held back waiting for something serious to talk about. We were like two magnets of the same charge that were constantly being pushed together by the hands of fate, but also repelled by the intensity of our combined magnetic forces. The four of us watched the sunrise with many others the next morning. It reminded me of a sporting event the way everyone cheered as the red sun finally began to pierce through the clouds. After that, we stopped at a restaurant close to the lookout point to eat a quick breakfast, and then hiked down the mountain. Nathan and I enjoyed bathing in some indoor hot springs that had been established near the bottom of the mountain while Jane and Summer waited outside for us. The hot spring tubs were made of black rocks that had been cemented together and smoothed over and contoured to the human body. Someone knocked on our doors asking us if we wanted a massage, but it wasn't necessary as the hot springs alone were enough to relax and refresh us after hiking for a couple of days. We spent about three days total in the Huangshan mountain area and then returned to Anqing. |
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| China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling A trip to Huangshan |
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