A morning call at 5AM had us safely assume that it wasn't raining outside. Jenny rounded us up to climb the summit of this epic mountain. We climbed up 1.5km in the freezing cold to the big cable car and waited outside for the sunrise but the fog was so dense that morning. Instead of being above Cloud Sea, we felt like we were drowning in it. We stood around for at least 45 minutes. The sky got brighter though not any clearer. The most eventful thing that happened was a lone chipmunk scurrying about. So many Chinese people crowded around that it was difficult to get a good picture.

We stepped inside the Golden Temple for a bit to escape the cold then took the cable car back to the hotel. On the way down, Emery bought me some warm woolly socks at one of the souvenir stands to cover my knees. It was handy for the next 4 hours or so.

Crawled out from our electric blankets and checked out around 9:25. Rode a bus all the way down the mountain. It was a long and nauseating journey that took about 45 minutes. The only way I survived it was by blanking out completely. We spotted two car crashes around some sharp turns.

Before transferring buses from Leshan to Chengdu, the tour group bought some more constipation foods at the bus station (Oreos, Capico chips, cup ramen and other junk). We were on the bus for another 2 hours before arriving at Traffic Hotel to pick up our big luggage.

Emery and I checked our email at a web cafe across from the hotel while everyone ran off to buy better foods at the local market around the corner. Scott came by the cafe and ordered fries/chips that tasted as good as ones back at home. Made me kind of homesick for Western food even though it's barely been 2 weeks since I've been out of the country.

After meeting up with everyone at 4ish, we broke off into separate cabs and headed to the train station. We boarded the sleeper train at 6. The trip to Xi'an would be 16 hours long.

Emery and I were assigned the 1st section of the 3rd cabin with two other group members, Annmarie and Sarah. We felt kind of restless and cramped since we could barely lift our heads up so some of us wandered around and struck up conversations in other sections. The tour group met another acupuncturist (Becky Jay from our group studied Chinese medicine as well) named Jenni. Emery, Scott, Jenny, Jenni, Becky Jay, and me all took turns to play Chinese poker until 8 or 9. It was Jenny's last day with us before transferring the group to a new tour guide but no one really talked about it. We just had as much fun as we could that night.

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Shared Expenses
cable car tickets to summit 140Y (70Y each)
snacks 60Y
ma la huo guo spices 20Y
long woolly socks 20Y
can of Sunkist 8Y
cup ramen on train 5Y

total = 253Y approx. $37US

* Tuesday, May 5, 2009