Date: 5 April 2010
Venue: Wuyi Shan, Fujian
The train from Xiamen to Wuyi Mountains took 13 hours. It was a night train, and I could hardly get any sleep. There wasn’t much to see at night, some tourists groups were getting on and off the train in the middle of the night… I don’t think I enjoyed it all that much anyway.
Upon arrival, the train assistant came over to talk to us about the hotel. Molly insisted we should get off the train to compare prices, the rest of us didn’t have any opinion - hey, we were exhausting, I could hardly open my already-too-small eyes. After talking to 2 assistants, Molly gave in and said we would stay with them (it was rather funny though, when those 2 assistants tried to talk us into staying with them, the 3 of us didn’t understand what they were saying, I sort of waved at them saying “we don’t understand you, talk to the other girl”, haha, aiya, our poor Mandarin!).
Hotel was once again very cheap, Yan and I were staying in one room while Molly and Kimmy were staying in the other. Very quickly did we take a shower and out we went again.
Breakfast was easy to get, and yeah well, cheap. We got on a bus then got off in front of the gate of Wuyi Shan. Immediately, a few rough farm women came up to us, asking whether we were to buy tickets. Molly did all the talking then before we knew it, we were following one of the women. Molly said they were the aborigines of Wuyi Shan, they knew their way to avoid checking tickets. Haha, to be honest, I was glad we followed her in, that saved us so much money! In was the famous Yunv Hills (少女峰) at the back in the left picture.
The woman led us the way was rather stout and very strong as well. She knew her way, she was talking very fast without taking a break. Ay, it was very sad, city girls like us have no chance outrunning her! A shame really!
On our way to the “Tiger Howling Rock” (虎嘯岩). Very very very steep. Our lead said “OK, you follow this path and I will meet you at the end, here is my number, if you don’t see me later then call me!” then off to the other way. Hah. Smart move.
We took way too long to walk the trail. We enjoyed taking silly pictures and having fun :) Do you think the rock in the picture looks like a fish? Yan was posing a fish - in case you can’t tell. Haha!
It really was a very nice trail - except it was way too steep. Very quiet and very green.
There were so much to see on the way. One of them - the very steep natural rock at my back. It wasn’t a very good picture but well, you see how steep it was at least!
At the bottom of the steep rock, there were some sticks ‘supporting’ the mountain, there was a story behind these sticks: old people believe if they put the sticks there to ‘support’ the mountain then their backs wouldn’t ache anymore. However, nowadays, they said if you put a stick there, you’d have a 靠山 (it means someone who’d be there to look after you)! How superstitious!
If it wasn’t so challenging to climb all those crazily steep rocks, here was another: The Thread of the Skies. You have to squeeze yourself between two narrow (way too narrow!) big rocks and thereby see “the thread of the skies”. Haha. Very silly, isn’t it? But we were tourists, that’s what tourists do, being silly and do whatever that is stupid! It wouldn’t be bad if the weather was nice and if there was a blue sky… but the point was, it was very wet and started raining. Hahaha, the rocks were all wet and so we were half soak after this. I won’t ever go inside again, “I will see you on the other side, bye bye!”
On our way back to the hotel, we saw the rafts - it was one of the must try in our list. Looking very romantic, yeah?
There wasn’t much to do in the end, we went to this temple. There was this middle-aged Hong Kong man walking next to me eating some candy, I asked him what it was, he gave me some to try. Haha, obviously he thought I was a local girl and said my Cantonese didn’t sound very native. HAHA! How was that even possible?! He later on caught up with us and helped us take this picture :)
We talked about how horrible the Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing was. Haha, what a day!
P.S. The stout lady said we should get up at 5am the next day to climb more mountains and take the raft. We had to obey. That night Yan and I slept at 8pm, HAHA, crazily unbelievable, right?!
Stay tune for our last day in Fujian :)
