Fuddland

We were prepared for it to be busy: after all, we were visiting during the week-long national holiday, so virtually anywhere we might have chosen was going to be overflowing with tourists. My personal hope was, drawing from my experiences climbing Fèng Huáng Shān, the number of people around us would be inversely proportional to our height above sea level. [Translation: the higher we went, the fewer other people we’d see.]

Of course, despite being on a bus bound for Jǐuhuá Shān (九华山), and being in possession of tickets that clearly said, “Destination: Jǐuhuá Shān”, our transportation didn’t actually terminate at Jǐuhuá Shān, but instead threw us off at a place called “So You Wanna Visit Jǐuhuá Shān? Then Give Us Your Cash”: a large building in which we had to buy two entrance tickets to the township and surrounding area of Real Jǐuhuá Shān. Then it was a further minibus-ride up the winding mountain roads to the town proper, which served as a wonderful introduction to the landscape, all lush green trees and rice paddy-covered farmland.

The small town of Jǐuhuá Shān is given over entirely to hotels, restaurants and other tourist-friendly services. As predicted, it was teeming with people, although interestingly we didn’t see any other foreigners almost the entire time we were there. In the town and at many points up the mountain path are various Buddhist temples and monasteries, and it seemed that a lot of the visitors were there for religious reasons as much as anything else.

Having arrived quite late in the day, we set aside the mountain ascension for the next day and decided to simply find a hotel, then have a bite to eat and a few beers. I’d read in my guidebook that it was possible to stay in the monastery, but disappointingly when we went in and asked, we were told that we couldn’t stay there because we weren’t [and aren’t] Chinese. It was the same problem I was faced with in Dīng Shān (丁山): forcing foreigners into the more expensive establishments under the assumption that we’re all significantly wealthier than locals.

Sensing our dejection with his well-honed emotional skills, one of the monks conjured a mobile phone from somewhere deep within his robes and made a few enquiries at other hotels on our behalf, but the one he led us to was on the pricey side. The monk just sort of wandered off without saying anything more, so we decided to take matters into our own hands and check out the other hotels in town. But just as we were about to start negotiating with a woman who’d approached us with an offer, our monk friend came running over, looking rather annoyed that we’d just walked away while he was — it transpired — still trying to help us. He called over a different woman who was hovering nearby and we agreed to check out her place, which turned out to be fine and about as good a price as we could hope to pay given the peak season. It was up some stairs and away from the town centre, providing nice respite from the bustle and noise of the crowds.

We picked a busy-looking restaurant and found that by merely hesitating slightly over whether to order a particular dish or not, the waiter offered to give it to us for a much reduced price. That’s the kind of non-aggressive haggling I like! A few local beers later [which, as with many Chinese beers, were so weak as to have no discernible effect — at least, that’s what I told my besht mate the traffic warden as I returned her hat], it was time to turn in and get a good night’s sleep ahead of the next day’s climb.