Hangzhou, Putuo Shan, and Shanghai

It's time for me to finally finish writing about my travels. I've been putting this last post off because I'm still unwilling to admit that this chapter in my life is over. But here I am, sitting at work in an air conditioned building (!) surrounded by mac computers (!) and english speakers (!) with access to a toilet that flushes toilet paper (!) and a short walk away from a number of stores that sell real chocolate (!), sandwitches (!), salads (!), and venus razors (!). But more on this later. The most interesting bit (in my opinion) is the actual traveling.

I did end up fleeing Shanghai, fleeing my captors. I oh-so-light-heartedly allowed them to take me in, yet after two days in their generous company, I was craving my solitude once again. Spending all your time with a group of people from such a different culture and mind set is exhausting. What I found most difficult was finding the balance between doing my best to fit into their culture and to not offend without compromising my own values. I am a feminist. I don't like to be taken care of. I don't like it when people pay for me or tell me what to do. They always wanted to follow THEIR culture's rules, always explained "Well this is what we do in Pakistan." I had to find a way to accomodate them, but to convince them to meet me half way in the middle. We weren't in Pakistan, and we weren't in America, so why should we follow either country's rules entirely? Exhausting. I wound up spending more of my time defending my own independence than actually having a good time. Even getting away for the few short hours when I wrote that last post was a struggle, borderline fight. Why do you want to be by yourself? You can't be alone in Shanghai! How will you find your way back? I'll just follow you around, pretend like I'm not here. Do you not like me, is that why you want to be alone? No, you're a girl, I definitely can't leave you alone in the city. They meant well, but I had to get out. So despite protests, I took off for the train station early Monday morning.

Hangzhou.
Ah, Hangzhou. The #1 domestic tourist location in China, and I hadn't even heard of it until February. I was worried, I'd seen what domestic tourism had done to once beautiful sancuaries of religion or nature in Yunnan Province (think Vegas style), but Hangzhou pleasantly surprised me. The city is famous for it's "West Lake" (Xi Hu), a huge lake in the center of the city that has, as the legend goes, inspired poets and artists for centuries. And to my great surprise, it was tastefully done. Yes, there were starebucks and various other western comforts surrounding the lake, and everything was overpriced (I paid 40 RMB to get into a temple park, which I later discovered did not even include the fee to get into the temple itself), but it was still beautiful and charming. The city isn't what I'd call modern - it lacks the metro system and tall, glistening buildings of Shanghai and Guangzhou. But it is clean and has many of the comforts you'd associate with Shanghai, including shopping and a night life. I think that if I have an opportunity to return to China for a semester of study or work, I'll try to find a way to do in Hangzhou. I'm ready to move on from Kunming, but I can't stand the pollution or the size of cities like Shanghai and Beijing, but I'd like the excitement, the activity, and the cosmopolitan factor that only seems to exist with bigger cities. And unlike Kunming, Hangzhou offers the benefit of a great train system and vicinity to cities like Shanghai making weekend trips infinitely easier.

I wound up only spending half a day there before taking off for a two day hike up Putuoshan. I made friends at my hostel and 4 of us decided to hike Putuo Shan ("Yellow Mountain") together, starting early the next morning. The trip didn't go exactly as planned, in fact very little went according to plan. But it ws certainly an adventure. We caught the 9:00 AM bus out of Hangzhou. It cost 88 RMB instead of the anticitpated 30, and it took 5 hours instead of the anticipated 3. Brutal. We arrived at the base town and were surrounded by people trying to get us to eat at their restaurant or hire them as a driver to the park entrance, another 20-30 minutes away. After a quick lunch, we hired a taxi to take us to the park entrance, where the entrance fee turned out to be 200 RMB instead of 100. It was shaping up to be an expensive trip.

We had the trail (or should I say stairs?) to ourselves because of our late start. It was incredibly foggy. We had no idea how far we'd come or how much further we had because anything more than about 10 yards away disappeared into the mist. We summitted in 2 hours, a short but brutal hike. Imagine walking up a staircase for 2 hours straight. We took the "Eastern Steps" - half the length of the western steps and twice as steep (or so we thought). When we got to the top, we found another explanation for the absense of hikers on our trail: a cablecar. It started where we started, ended where we ended, and took 1/10 the time and 1/1000000 the effort. We got to the top and started searching for food and lodging. Everything was insanely overpriced - 100 RMB for dorm beds that should cost 20, 15 RMB for a cup of instant noodles that should cost 3. And bottles of water, don't even get me started on that. After a lot of hard negotiation, we finally settled into a 4 person dorm for 60 RMB each and quietly ate our overpriced and undernourishing instant noodles. It felt a bit like being at camp in the wooden dorm room on top of a mountain. We missed the sunset completely due to fog, so we resigned ourselves to getting up at 4:30 the next morning to see the sunrise. This we did, along, with the other guests in the surrounding hotels, to be disapointed. No sunrise, only lots and lots of fog. It was still pretty and peaceful, and after paying our respects to the absent sun, we returned to bed for a few more hours before starting the long descent. We chose to take the longer Western steps down the moutain, a path that turned out to be much more crowded in the absence of a chair lift option. It took us 4 hours, most of the time negotiating our way through throngs of people until we reached the beginning of the western steps chair lift where they all magically disappeared from the path. "Down" is not quite the accurate way to describe our route - "steep" is a little more like it. Turned out we had to summit a few more peaks for making the final descent, explaining how we could maintain the same gradient as our upward climb had over twice the distance. We spent the entire hike down talking about the delicous lunch we would have at the bottem. Our bodies had been absent of any decent nourishing sinse our quick lunch the day before. When we got to the bottem, we discovered the next bus left in 20 minutes, pretty much just enough time to buy the tickets and pick up a snack or two and the neighboring convinience store before settling in for 5 long hours of continued hunger and now achiness and filth (no showers on the mountain). The situation was comical. What was more comical was Heather's insistance that we eat before we shower upon arriving back in Hangzhou. That's priorities for you!

Coming back to Hangzhou was somewhat of a homecoming. Brave adventurers, home from a trek. We showered. We ate. We slept in a clean dorm room - everything one needs to be comfortable and happy. We tried not to tell too many people that the
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I realize this last post isn't finished. It's been sitting in draft format sinse I returned home in June, and I finally decided it was time to post. What happens between Hangzhou and home remains a mystery (thankfully I kept paper journals!), but here is the last of my posting for this blog.