Last Friday night, Boer, Kiran, Alec, Kat and I took a night train to Qufu, birthplace of Confucius. The blankets and pillows they gave us on the train smelled like they had been used as a Port-a-Potty rag, and the windows were open, which made every train we passed sound like a head-on collision. I was sweating most of the time, and I barely slept.
We got off in Qufu around 7:30 a.m., and it was raining pretty hard. We ran in to the first store we found, and luckily they had some umbrellas for sale. We waded across the flash-flooded street to a tent under which a woman was frying dough, and Boer ordered us all a bowl of bean and rice porridge with sugar. We walked to the Confucius temple, and although it was interesting, I was too tired and wet to care much. Just more temples, more red walls, more yellow roofs, more Chinese writing, more statues, more lame gift shops with the same stuff they have at every giftshop in China, dreary and grey and wet. Some of the trees and overgrown gardens were pretty.
Next we went to the Confucius mansions, the big man’s old homestead (he was from a very rich family). It was a lot more interesting, especially the gardens, which were lush and green and reminded me of home a little. We found a bus that was supposed to go to Tai'an "sometime soon." By this time it had cleared up some, and it was stiflingly hot. We sat on the bus thinking it would leave at any moment. Three hours later we still hadn't moved.
Finally the bus was full enough, and we drove through towns and green fields and villages that could almost just as easily have been Porum, Oklahoma. We also saw donkey carts and hovels and sometimes people whose ribs were clearly visible. A guy sitting in front of us finally looked back and asked us where we were from in very good English. He apologized for listening into our conversation for awhile. He said he had never talked to a foreigner before. Alec talked to him for a while, and we learned that he was from Ningxia province and went to school in Xi'an. His major was English, but he was only a freshman, and he kept apologizing for his English, which was excellent. When he said he had never talked to a foreigner, we were astonished.
We asked him about his home, and he said it was horribly polluted with coal mining and burning, and there was some tension between the Hui and Han people (Han are the so-called native or original Chinese). I asked if he would like to visit the U.S., and he said, "In this country there are so many people, it is very hard to get a passport." I realized anew how much freedom and travel are restricted in China. I take for granted how easy it is for me to leave the country.
We had lunch at Tai'an, and we chatted about Tai Shan, the holy mountain we planned on climbing that night. Thousands, maybe millions, of Chinese climb it each year to watch the sunrise from its summit. It is located in western Shandong province, and it is known as the holiest mountain in China. Several deities (Taoist and otherwise) make their home there, and it is said that its peak is the first thing the sun touches when it rises over China. Confucius climbed it and uttered, "The world is small." Mao lumbered up and declared, "The East is Red." (I'm getting all this from my Lonely Planet guide.) People come from all over China to make the pilgrimage, so we thought we'd join the bandwagon. Whatever it was, we figured, it would probably beat another weekend in Qingdao.
We went up the central route, which in the daytime is an open-air museum of artifacts, temples, and literary allusions and puns carved into the stones and cliffs along the path. The route we took was an 8 km hike with about a 1500m (4500 ft) elevation gain. At about 8:00 p.m. we got to the base of the stone steps that would take us all the way to the top. (China's obsession with touristry had turned the mountain into an endless stone staircase lined on all sides with cheesy gift shops and run-down hotels along with the streams, cliffs, trees, and boulders.) We had to pay 60 yuan ($8) just to pass the gate, which seemed really expensive in Chinese terms.
It was a warm, still night filled with the sounds of bugs and rushing water all around, pleasant and refreshing. I felt like walking ahead of the group for a little solitude, which is a precious and rare commodity in Chinese cities. I stopped occasionally to make sure they were within earshot. They called after me occasionally, warning me to stay with the group. We were walking in darkness, relying on our black-and-white night vision and flashlights when we really needed them. But as long as I paid careful attention, I didn’t think anything could go too wrong.
I had just climbed another set of stairs and stepped onto a flat stretch when I heard barking just ahead of me. It sounded very loud in the still night. I stood perfectly still and held my breath. Then I watched in mild amusement as two little white dogs ran--more like waddled--toward me. When one ran behind my ankle, I kept still to make sure I didn’t step on him and make him mad or anything. But to my surprise, the little dog just walked right up and bit me on the ankle. It didn't hurt much, and I suspected it hadn't even broken the skin, but when I trained my MagLite on it, there was a little blood trickling onto my sock.
I dreaded the thought of going through all the steps I'd have to go through to prevent rabies in China. I and this dog had turned a nice night of mountain climbing into a potential nightmare of worrying, arguing, and possibly having to abort the whole trip and go back into town to search for a doctor. And the dog probably didn't even have rabies, he was just being a punk. (Although, of course, if I had just stayed with thegroup... it might have bitten someone else. Just kidding.)
The owner, who was sitting on a stump by the wall the whole time, got up, chained the dog, and sat back down. I couldn't talk to him, so I just waited for the others. When they caught up, I showed them my ankle and told them what had happened, and Boer went to talk to the man by the wall. The man sat silent as a stump and turned away. Boer was insistent, and finally the man's wife came out to talk to us. She told us the dogs had had their shots, but the papers weren't available right now. Even if she had had papers, it wouldn't have meant much to us. Alec mentioned that rabies shots were a nightmare. I thought about those eleven shots in the stomach I had heard about, guessing that that was what he was talking about, and I felt even worse.
After I had cleaned the wounds with some bottled water, hand sanitizer, antibiotic cream, and bandaids, Boer and I headed back down the mountain to the entrance, where there was sure to be a PSB officer or two. (The PSB is like China's KGB.) The woman got very nervous when we mentioned the PSB, and she offered to take me to the hospital herself. Boer and I ignored her and started down the mountain.
We'd only gone down a little way when we were overtaken by a shirtless guy with a big belly. He talked to Boer for a while, and Boer said he was a PSB officer who had heard the disturbance and came to see what was up. He didn't have his badge with him or a shirt on because he had rushed out of his office, and he didn't want to go back because it was a ways up the mountain. He asked me to unwrap my leg and show him the wound, but I didn't want to undo all the cleaning and bandaging I had just done. And I didn't trust his excuse for not having a badge, and besides, how did he know to find us? I suspected he was the brother of the dog owners or something, and I told Boer I wasn't going to talk to this guy until he produced a badge, or at least a shirt.
So he took us up to an office which had the Chinese characters for PSB written on either side of the door. The man invited me to sit on a couch, where he examined the bite. He poured us each a mug of warm water and got a tub of water and cleaned out my wound with that and a bar of soap. Boer asked him if the dogs on this mountain had regular rabies shots, and the officer assured us that all the dogs got their shots twice monthly. This sounded suspect, and while he might have been telling the truth, I wasn’t going to bet my health on it.
Still shirtless, he stood up and began to do some movement which Boer identified as part of a Chinese practice where the practicer can collect and concentrate electrical bio-energy or something like that. When he came back over, he invited me to touch his belly. I expected the flab to be spongy, but to my surprise, it was astonishingly hard, harder than flexed muscle. I asked Boer what that meant, and he said it was the collected energy. I thought, if he can collect that much stomach energy, why doesn't he collect himself a six-pack? Later when I asked Boer that, he said in his usual pragmatic way, "Because he probably drinks too much beer."
After I had established that his belly was hard, he began moving his hands in various patterns over my leg and the wound for a few minutes, not actually touching it except occasionally to hit a pressure point or something. At the end, Boer translated that he had purified the wound, plus given me three days' worth of energy. Not that I believed any of this outright or anything, but somehow I was comforted a little. It was better than nothing, and the wound did look much healthier after being cleaned thoroughly with soap and water. And who knows, just because this stuff isn't scientifically proven doesn't mean there's not something to it. After all, the Chinese have had 4000 years of trial and error, often trying things that modern medicine would never think of. But the three days' worth of energy thing was definitely bogus; the next day, after we got off the mountain, I passed out every time I laid my head down.
And of course none of this meant that I wasn't going to start my rabies shots as soon as I got back to Qingdao, although Alec's words sure made me feel awful about it. The officer put antibiotics on the wound again and band-aided it up. I thanked him, and we started up the mountain again.
The ankle didn't bother me, but an inflamed tendon in the same foot hurt now and then. The Lonely Planet guide said the mountain had 6,660 steps (6 is a lucky number in China, three 6's doubly so--go figure), and all of them were too short and shallow for American feet. When I took stairs two at a time it didn't bother me, but when I got tired and we reached the almost-vertical part of the climb (stairs that went up and up in one line, like a wall), I had to take the steps one at a time to conserve energy. Kiran taught me how to climb like a mountaineer, pausing a split second with one leg straight on each step to put the strain on the skeleton instead of the muscles. But taking them one at a time felt like I was going backwards, and I felt like I stubbed my toe on about every other stair. I think we reached the nearly-vertical part a little before midnight. I sang songs in my head to keep my energy up and break the monotony. I also pretended there were fresh-baked fudge brownies at the top waiting for me, and that thought always gave me a little extra energy.
Finally around 2:00 a.m. we made it to the top, and the guy who had cleaned my foot had called ahead to reserve us... something, we weren't sure what. But we walked to the hotel that he had told us about, and a guy was asleep there in the cold, bare lobby on a wooden bench. He woke up and offered the bench to us. There were a bunch of old army coats, drab green, calf-length, fur-collared, smelly, and fifty pounds each, stacked up on the coffee table, and we used those for pillows and blankets. I curled up in a ball on one end of a bench and slept for a couple of hours.
At 4:00 a.m. it was time to wake up and continue on to the summit to catch the sunrise. I woke up with a full bladder, and the only facilities available was a small enclosed communal trough where about three women at a time could squat down and do their business as everyone in line looked on (no dividers, no walls). Just as it was my turn, a woman cut in front of me, and all I could think to do was grab her coat in silent protest. But she snarled at me, so I let her go. When I had my turn, I was directly behind her, and I thought briefly about pushing her in.
Everyone on the mountain had borrowed one of the giant army coats to march up the last bit, and we looked like a line of silent monks ascending the stairs in the semi-dark.
In half an hour we reached the flat stretch at the top, and everyone staked out a place to sit and watch the show. The first lights were already softly glowing in the east in pale pink and purple and blue, and we watched for more than an hour as the lights and colors slowly changed and shifted. I've heard that on a clear day, you can see 200 km all the way to the Yellow Sea coast, but today we could see little but the crags directly in front of us. Cloud cover reached up well past the horizon. But it had been raining the day before, and it was projected to rain all weekend (it did rain the next day), so we considered it a miracle that we could see anything at all. And the low clouds on the horizon and the wispy clouds high above in the clear sky made for some gorgeous colors and tones. The only thing marring the peaceful morning was hawkers trying to get you to buy polaroids of yourself holding the rising sun in your hand.
One part of the sky glowed intense pink against the deep blue of the sky for a while, and the clouds above it golden. But then, quite a ways to the right, a bright pink streak appeared in the middle of the clouds, and after a long time (though time doesn't seem to have much meaning when you're watching the sun rise), the outline of the sun was finally visible through the pink window, and everyone cheered.
I and my knees had no intention of going back down the vertical wall of too-short stairs. I was impressed that some intrepid old Chinese grandmas and girls in jeans and high heels made it up all right, and I assume some of them also walked back down again. Luckily there was a ski-lift that would take us back down the mountain for about $5 apiece.
We spent the rest of the day, from around 6:30 a.m.until 2:00 p.m. when our train would leave, wandering around Tai'an. I was starving only a little less than I was sleepy, and I followed Boer to a department store and up about six escalators to the top floor, where I assumed there would be some kind of restaurant. Nope. Just a stand selling nasty Chinese ice cream. I sighed and passed out in a nearby massage chair. Their massage chairs are pretty painful if you turn them on. I can't imagine why someone would buy such a torture machine. But for me it meant a couple of hours of blissful sleep after I turned the grinding gears off, and the sales women mercifully didn't kick me out.
The train ride was seven hours of sitting still and listening to ear-splitting easy-listening Chinese music. Chinese pop music is pretty lame to begin with, and when you get into Chinese easy-listening... I spent most of the train ride with toilet paper stuffed in my ears finishing Deepak Chopra's Perfect Health, all the while noting the irony of reading it while wallowing in the filth of the night train smeared over with mountain-climbing sweat, splitting my eardrums, eating indigestible food, potentially harboring a deadly virus, and heading back to the most polluted city I've ever been in.
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