I Grew My Boobs in China (27 page)

We arrived in the foggy predawn at the front door of a hotel with a tall glass entrance that was shut tight. All was quiet and we dared not talk above a whisper. Pipes were dripping from balconies and electrical wires were strung along and between buildings all up and down the misty alley. I pretended it was the early 1700s and imagined a man in a tailored coat sneaking past us to enjoy a secret rendezvous as his carriage waited in the night.

We knocked and rang. A small light, barely enough to cast a shadow, glowed from deep within a hallway. A round, robed man with messy hair and eyes that squinted even more than usual appeared behind the screen door. He inspected the four of us carefully for a moment before moving aside to let us in. He couldn’t have been aware of the pink robe he was wearing.

“I hope that’s his wife’s,” Mom said out of the side of her mouth as we followed the tails of flowing pink up the spiralling staircase. She normally would have said it aloud, but tonight she didn’t want to gamble on his not knowing any English. He didn’t seem to be in a particularly humorous mood. Turning to leave, he handed us a clunky, old fashioned key on a heavy metal chain.

“I guess we’ll take care of payment later,” Mom said as she closed the stiff door behind us. Too tired to deal with any business, he presumably went straight back to bed. I pictured him hanging up the pink robe next to his own before slipping in beside his wife, completely unaware of the first impression he had just made.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The following day’s schedule took us to the foothills of the sacred Emei Shan. Walking sticks in hand and daypacks on our backs, we were awed by the sheer legion of stairs before us.

“Two days? That’s not too bad,” I said, underestimating the brutality of what it would take to reach “sanctity.” “It’s not like we’re going to be hiking or anything. It’ll just be like taking the stairs to the top of a tall building!”
Finally, my fear of elevators and the practice I’d had climbing long flights of stairs to avoid them would pay off!

“Yep, and the views are supposed to be amazing, so it’ll be well worth it,” Mom told us eagerly.

“I just want to see the monkeys,” I said, and took off enthusiastically just before a light drizzle began to dampen the leaves of the bamboo forest surrounding us. It took less than an hour for my morale to plummet as the stairs went from easy-peasy to downright miserable and uninspiring.

“When is this going to end? And where are my monkeys?” I whined, shaking a droplet from the end of my nose.

“Isn’t this place supposed to be crawling with them?” Bree asked.

“With all these “Beware of the monkeys” signs, you’d sure think so,” I said, glaring at Ammon. We’d seen a number of pictures of rabid-looking monkeys beside plastic bags that had a big X over them. They weren’t really “beware of monkeys” signs; they were meant to warn tourists not to carry plastic bags.

“We need to go to a store,” Mom said.

“Why?” I asked, annoyed that she probably wanted a pop.

“To get some plastic bags. The monkeys obviously want them!” she giggled as we passed yet another warning sign.

“Are you sure this is the right season for monkeys?” I asked Ammon.

“Yah, Ammon. Maybe they’re hibernating or something,” Bree said accusingly, trying to outsmart him.

“Who cares about the monkeys? This is one of the ultimate sacred places in China,” Ammon replied.

“I bet it’s a Unicorn Site, too,” Bree said. She was the only one who still had lots of air left in her lungs.

“UNESCO, you mean? Yes, actually. It is,” he said, only slightly annoyed.

“Unicorn sounds better,” Bree laughed to herself.

“It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996,” Ammon continued, “but people have been making pilgrimages to this place for two thousand years. So it’s got major history! This place goes as far back as the time of Christ,” he finished, putting it into perspective for us.

“So, while He was over there in the desert walking on water, these guys were over here hiking up this mountain?” Bree sounded impressed.

“Yah, I guess that’s basically what I’m saying,” he confirmed.

My head fell back in awe as I passed under another decorative gateway. Red pillars reached down from the arched and pointed roofs, and a black wooden sign displaying golden Chinese lettering hung in the center. It looked incredibly mystical.

“The slopes of Emei Shan have been inhabited for ten thousand years. It’s one of the four sacred mountains in China, but this one is a thousand metres higher than the other three,” Ammon continued.

“Oh gee! Aren’t we the lucky ones! How far is it to the top?” I asked.

“A little over three thousand metres,” was his immediate answer.

“Oh, man,” I said, “how high is that in feet?” Though I was not that familiar with the metric system, I could already tell that this “walk” was going to be a bigger challenge than I’d anticipated.

Ammon did a quick mental conversion and replied, “About, ten thousand feet or so.”

“Holy crap!” I exclaimed, regretting my initial enthusiasm.

“Seriously, Ammon, how do you remember all this?” Bree demanded. A bit impressed with himself, too, he just laughed and carried on.

Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I looked back to gauge our progress. Below us, the roofs of the gateways, each with their gallant arches, were layered one upon the other and looked like Viking ships sailing between the branches. The appearance of the pillars had changed from pure red to a deep, smoky rouge. Seen through the mist, they were a bit eerie and yet stunningly beautiful in their own way.

“This is awesome!” Ammon said.

“There’s hardly anybody here, either. It’s so peaceful,” Mom observed.

“No one except them,” Bree said, as we jumped out of the path of two men jogging past carrying a fat man in what looked like an old war stretcher with a modern twist. It featured a built-in seat made of sticks of bamboo painted blue, green, and red. They had come up behind us through the grey fog, never faltering or slowing their pace in the least.

“My gosh! How do they do that?! They are so strong!!! They aren’t even shaking; they’re hardly even sweating,” Mom noticed.

“Couldn’t we do that?! Why do we have to walk it? There is nothing to see or do except, ugh!” I said, demonstrating slow, heavy movements up one more stair and then another, dragging my arms like the monkeys I wasn’t seeing. My feet felt damp and soggy, and droplets fell from the tips of my baby curls that were beginning to spring up all over the place from the moisture in the air.

“It costs a hundred bucks to do that. Plus, we wouldn’t experience the same sense of accomplishment when we got to the top,” Ammon explained, but I knew he was only thinking about his wallet again, or should I say, his money belt.

“We could all sit on top of each other and we’d still be lighter than him, so now it’s only twenty-five bucks each,” I said.

“It’s not about the money,” Mom said.

“That’s such a lie,” Bree laughed.

“That guy’s beating me to enlightenment,” I said, and realized even as I said it just how cheesy I sounded.

The man sitting so comfortably (at least as comfortably as one could expect while bouncing between two men at a steep angle) didn’t have to tackle the stairs, and that seemed very appealing at this moment. But as two more porters passed by carrying another sallow city man nestled behind a huge potbelly, I began to reconsider. I just couldn’t picture myself sitting in that chair.

At the top of the next bend, we came to another million-and-a-half stairs extending endlessly on into the fog and then narrowing away into nothing amidst the overhanging trees. There were no signs or directions, nothing but a giant stairway to “heaven.” The stairs that wound through the lush natural vegetation were mostly made of concrete, but sometimes they were just dirt. A single green handrail appeared and disappeared, apparently without design. The trees glistened from the morning showers, and I had to admit it was enchanting.
Two steps, one more. Two steps, one more.

A lion statue called out to me as I neared. I felt its wet nose hard against my inner palm and then bent my head forward against its nose, holding onto his menacing fangs with both hands. I closed my eyes and its teeth became prison bars, the stone figure a barricade blocking my ability to move forward. I lifted my head and rested my chin on the statue’s snout. The drips beneath its chin soaked through my left pant leg.

“Ugghh,” I groaned and pushed off from the lion statue, patting his drenched side as I passed.

The others were about a dozen stairs above me and still climbing. Mom was standing to wait for me and catch her breath at the same time.
Two steps, one more. Two steps, one more.

“For someone who hates hiking so much, you sure don’t show it!” I gasped between words.

“I don’t hate hiking. I love it. I just hate exercise for the sake of exercise,” Mom explained as she pushed on. “This is a long walk with beautiful scenery. It just kills me to be stuck in one spot on a treadmill. Yuck!” I’d often wondered how she stayed so slim through the years. I’m almost certain she’d never had a gym membership in her entire life, but then again, she’d been a gymnast like Bree back in her day.

Ammon was always far ahead of us, his longs legs allowing him to cover in one step what took us two or three. But at each bend in the stairway, he would stop and wait, ready to tell us more about what we were seeing.

“Did you know, Emei Shan literally means ‘Delicate Eyebrow Mountain’? Its name comes from two peaks that face each other and look like the delicate eyebrows of a classic Chinese beauty.”

“Yah, yah, yah,” I said, dying for oxygen. We’d been walking for seven solid hours, and the last thing I wanted to hear more about was this damn mountain. The few other tourists we’d seen on the trail were all domestic, and they somehow climbed those stairs dressed in suits and heels.

The natives of the holy mountain were very fit and active from carrying, not only the city folk, but also loads and loads of bricks. If they were not actually carrying things up and down, then they were trudging alongside their mules as they carried them. At one stretch, we seemed to pass by many of these quadrupeds. There was only one way up the mountain and parts of it were very awkward, steep, and/or slippery, which made me wonder how on earth those donkeys/horses/mules, or whatever the heck they were, got up here in the first place.

The steps were short and wide in some sections, steep and narrow in others, but in either case, they were never the perfect height or width to allow me to develop a steady stride. We were finding it hard enough just to walk the stairs, and they were making their poor animals carry very heavy loads. It just felt unnatural in every way.

At one point, there was no guard rail or even a fence to hang onto, so I was focusing on the ground, watching my mucky boots plod along up the mud-covered stairs. Just ahead of me, I saw the skinny hindquarters of a small, quivering horse bearing two wicker baskets bulging with red bricks. He looked totally squashed, and my heart hurt for him and the few others ahead.
They’re struggling so hard to finish their day’s work to please their masters.
I cringed as I saw that he was ready to collapse under the weight of his load, his dainty ankles trembling as he searched for each narrow, jagged step. It took all his strength to hold himself up. Rooting three legs to the earth, he’d struggle to find the next step with his fourth, scraping his hoof on the uneven stair.

“C’mon, let’s get around this guy. He’s not going to make it,” Mom said frankly as she picked up the pace. We hurriedly made our way past, expecting the worst.

“You really think he won’t?!” I asked.

“I really don’t know, but I do know that you can work a horse to death! If you push them hard enough, they’ll drop dead from exhaustion before they’ll give up,” Mom explained. That’s what I was seeing right before my eyes. He wasn’t going to stop. It was taking longer and longer for him to take each step. He foamed at the neck and beneath the straps of the baskets. My heart tensed. I didn’t think he could go another step, let alone the hundreds more to come, and I was watching when his legs buckled as his knees completely gave out, and he went tumbling down end over end.

We gasped as flecks of mud flew from the creases in his hooves as he fell down dozens of stairs in a full backwards somersault. Shouts from local men seemed timeless as his feet stretched high in the air and exposed his soft belly. He finally came to a halt by crashing into a tree.

The alarmed owner quickly ran down to unload the bricks. The horse looked like he was fading fast. We waited and worried and watched to see what would happen next, glad to be taking a breather ourselves. A little more than stunned, the poor horse eventually began to move. I was both amazed and concerned when he rolled over and hoisted himself back onto all fours, somehow righting himself even though he still had at least half the original load on his back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The lighting hadn’t changed all day through the fog, but I knew it had to be getting late.

“A whole dang day and no monkeys!” I exclaimed, finally catching up to Ammon at the edge of a clearing.

“Well, I just saw one on the roof of that monastery,” Ammon said.

“What!!” I exclaimed. Rushing further into the clearing, I looked side to side and shouted, “Where? Where?”

“What? What?” Bree asked as she bounced around, not sure what she was looking for.

“It’s gone now. See? If you weren’t slacking all the time, you’d have seen it,” Ammon said. I glared at him and he laughed.

“Hey, look! It’s the horse,” Mom shouted and pointed as the tired animal actually crested the summit where our monastery was located. I was more than pleased that he’d made it; it meant I would be able to sleep that night.

“I hope they don’t make him work tomorrow!” Bree said.

“He deserves a vacation!” I agreed.

“Are you kidding me? If he’s lucky, he’ll
get
to work,” Ammon started, “Otherwise he’s just considered damaged goods, and they’d probably just retire him and then eat him.”