Remember that national week series that I started months ago? Well it is sort of done, I am still working on the third and final part. These events that took place in this blog post happened over three months ago. Hope you will still enjoy reading it.
Stepping off the train in Nanjing, we were all extremely exhausted and desperately clamoring for a hotel. Having no idea where to go and possessing no map, we asked the taxi driver to take us to the nearest hotel. The driver took us to a street full of hotels and we picked the one with the cleanest lobby, thinking that it would be representative of how clean the rooms would be. This turned out to be a completely incorrect assumption and the hotel we chose was absolutely disgusting. Adding salt to the wound was the fact that we paid full price for the hotel without realizing that we could have haggled it down at least a 100RMB. However, the night we were all glad just to have somewhere to sleep.
Disgusting hotel room but we made due
The next day began bright and early with the buying of our Huangshan bus tickets and a search for a better hotel. The night before, I had hoped that the line at the bus stop would be shorter because it was the first day of national day and I thought that perhaps everybody had gotten their tickets early. Sadly, I was extremely mistaken, because at the bus station was the largest mob of Chinese people I have ever seen. They were all pushing and jostling, as Chinese people do, for bus tickets. Being inside the mob was quite the experience, never one to shy away from close physical contact (I do jiujitsu after all) Crystal and I pushed and squished our way in line. This is not to say that we were cutting the queue, in fact, all the pushing was just to try to keep our place in line. Acquiring the Huangshan bus tickets was a huge relief and a turning point for things finally starting to go our way on this trip.
After spending a few hours searching for a better hotel, we realized that not every hotel is able to take foreign guests. At one hotel we even managed to check in and move into the room, before they realized that they could not accept us! In the end we settled on a four star hotel that had rejected us earlier because we could not have a mixed gender room. We got around this mixed gender problem by having just Brendan and I check in and then “sneaking” Crystal into the room. For about the same price that we paid for our first hotel, we got a four star hotel room.
At the conclusion of the long hotel search, we decided to check out a place that a woman on the train had mentioned as one of the few places worth seeing in Nanjing. Crystal did some guesswork as to what the name of the place was because it was hard to understand the woman’s accent and discovered that it was a Confucius temple. If Confucius was around, however, I doubt that he would have liked what he saw happen to his temple. The whole place was covered in neon lights and the temple complex was filled with commercial shops. Perhaps I am mixing up the Confucian values with the Buddhist values of a chaste life, but there was just something demeaning about putting up dragon neon lights on the side of a couple hundred year old temple. When I complained about the Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai as being a tourist trap and having sold itself out, I had no idea that it could worse. This Confucian temple was completely redefining selling out for me.
Selling out
You pay for each hit of the drum at the temple
On our second day in Nanjing, we decided to head this mountain where Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum was located. We never got to the mausoleum because we kept getting sidetracked by the ancient Chinese buildings and tombs that dotted the mountain. These historical attractions maintained their character and were a nice break from commercialism at the Confucius temple. However, I was once again shocked by how damage was being done attractions, particularly the sculptures. Tourists were climbing and leaning on these extremely old statues of animals and mythical creatures. The wear on these sculptures was obvious, with some areas of the sculptures being completely worn smooth. This of course did not stop us from attempting to scale one of the larger sculptures, with the intent of one upping the other tourists.
Quiet and graceful just how ancient buildings should feel
A huge amount of effort was put into climbing this camel
The second day ended with the ridiculous decision of hiking up to the top of the mountain. We thought that the hike would be short due to the fact that the tourist map that we had was not drawn to scale, except for the path up the mountain. The hike took us a grueling forty minutes and we made it harder on ourselves by choosing the steeper and rockier paths. When we reached the top it was extremely foggy, meaning there was absolutely no view, but the relief from reaching the top meant that none of us cared. All ended well as we took the longest cable car trip I have ever taken in my life, back down the mountain.
On the route of our biggest mistake in Nanjing ...
... that led us to our biggest reward
Exhausted, we gathered our things from the hotel and boarded the bus to Huangshan.
