China Day 3

I wake up and have noodles for breakfast for the first time. Noodles, soy sauce vegetable stock broth and a few spring onions. It’s great. What a quick and delicious breakfast and my t shirt is now already stained with noodle slurp.

Today we travel to Mount Emeishan and prepare ourselves for the three day hike to the top and back down again. Mount Emeishan is the tallest of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China with it’s peak sitting at 3100m. Over the next few days we will climb 3700m of steps. No trail, just steps. Back to the train station and back on the incredible Chinese railway service!

We want to start the climb nice and early and have decided to take a days rest before the assent. We decide to visit Baoguo temple in the foothills of the mountain and search for a place to drink some tea, China style! The rest of the day is spent sitting by the river in the bamboo forest talking about life, China, and the rest.

It is quickly becoming apparent that absolutely no one speaks anything other than mandarin here but luckily for me, Will has been learning mandarin for the last couple of years which has already got us through a lot of confusing conversations. What Will had not been expecting was that the Sichuan accent is very thick. He’s struggling to understand what people are saying but they are able to understand him. Many conversations end with me asking what Will and the person have been talking about for the last five minutes. Some of the time Will will respond with “I have absolutely no idea, I couldn’t understand a single thing they were saying.”. I try to learn a few phrases to get by but im notoriously awful with languages. I have remembered “Wo bu ming bi”, I don’t understand.

Eventually we are told to leave as the staff were finished for the day as they bring out a giant pot of noodles for them all to slurp up. As we get back to the teddy bear hostel the person running the desk lets us know that tomorrow it is going to absolutely piss it down and wished us good luck.