Where's My Fortune Cookie?: Stairway to Heaven

Chengdu Trip - Mt. Emei

After the panda trip, we caught a bus out to Mt. Emei (about 2 hours away), which is one of the sacred Buddhist mountains in China. We spent the night at the hostel at the base and planned to do a 2 day hike starting the next day. Our plan was to bus up 1/4 of the way and then hike to the top (according to our map, about a 10-14 hour hike) over the span of 2 days, spending the night in one of the mini hotels or monasteries on the mountain.

The next day, we woke up and took the bus to the temple about 1/4 of the way up. To get there, you go up quite a few stairs, which we thought was pretty normal for a mountain, not knowing what was ahead of us. We took a rest at the temple and then started out on the path to the top that started there. What we quickly realized was that the 10ish hour hike was going to be literally straight up stairs. There was stairway after stairway, winding all the way up the mountain. Joe and I did it for about 2 hours and then decided that we'd rather just pay to have the bus drive us the top, so we walked down to the bus and went up that way. The rest of our group actually hiked all the way up the stairs to the top - it took them about 7 hours and they said that it was literally all stairs. I think we made the right decision.

The bus to the top was about an hour and was on the most winding road I have ever driven on. Joe slept while I attempted not to get bus sick in the back. At one point, we got so high that we were driving through the cloud layer and literally could not see out of the windows - comforting when the driver is speeding up winding roads to the top! We got up to the top bus station and had to hike up to the cable car that would take us to the top. It was much colder at the top and we were still in the cloud cover. All you could see off the sides of the mountain was pure white. We had a hard time finding the cable car station because you couldn't see anything until you were standing right in front of it, but we eventually bought our tickets and got on with about 40 other people (it was a HUGE cable car). As we ascended for about 5 minutes, we finally broke through the cloud cover and everything was magically sunny and clear again. Once at the top, we walked around and saw the big Buddhist statue that is the most famous part of the mountain. We decided at that point that we didn't want to spend the night on the mountain because we were done hiking, so we went back down the mountain during the last hour of buses running and thought that we could get a room in our hostel from the night before.

When we made it down to the base, we saw a huge swarm of people that weren't there before. It was the Tomb Sweeping holiday, so they were all preparing to hike themselves. We tried at 3 different places and nowhere had any beds for us. We made the split decision to take the last bus back to Chengdu, which was where we would've been headed the next day anyway. The bus was leaving in 20 minutes, so we sped over to the bus station, cut the line and bought 2 tickets, meanwhile a guy was yelling "tourists! Chengdu! Over there!" in Chinese and rushing us to the bus. We made it on and called our hostel from Chengdu but couldn't get through. At this point, we were exhausted, and just wanted anywhere to sleep so we called one of the sister hostels that is owned by the same people and managed to get a bed there for the night. It was a crazy experience overall and not at all what we had planned, but we think we did pretty well in dealing with it and we were happy to be done hiking and have a place to sleep that night.

Mount Emei was beautiful and amazing at the top, we just wish that we would've had a better idea of what the hike would be like from the beginning so it wouldn't have been such a surprise!