The ‘Sea of Clouds’

It was such a happy reunion that night. Each of us clutching our own passport with its precious visa in it…

You’d think we’d won the ‘Radio 3 World Music Awards’ the way we were jumping around the room.

After the initial excitement Theo and Rosa fetched the food they’d saved for me, and I filled them in on all the details of my adventure. They were particularly keen to know what I’d learned about ceramics and pottery in 16th century China…

After an exhaustive catch up on which dynasty had come up with what new glaze technique we were all ready to move on.

They caught me up on their day and we started to talk about our journey home – we had some serious planning to do, but that could wait.

Tomorrow was our last day in Guilin.

The forecast for the morning was heavy rain. I wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye in person to my Tai Chi group.

I let it go, I was on the group chat, receiving thirty texts a day reminding me to be positive and happy : )…I would stay connected.

‘Let every day laughter, help health; Let every day of happiness, flashing time; Let mutual greetings, feel comfortable; Let the sincere friendship, long day and night! ☕️🌹🌹

I loved my Tai Chi texts : )

The rain woke me that next morning and Rosa and I went to get our ‘hong dou zhou’ for the last time. We thanked the lovely cook for making such a delicious (and cheap) breakfast for us each day (40p a serving!)…and we also let her know why we wouldn’t be back.

I have never liked the idea of being somewhere every day for a while, and then suddenly, we’re not. When I’ve had a relationship with someone, however small, I like to say goodbye and explain why they won’t see me anymore… I didn’t want our lovely porridge lady to think we’d gone somewhere else for our porridge, or didn’t like her porridge anymore!

I am a fan of good endings.

This does not mean I have to tell the cashier at the local supermarket where I buy our ‘peanuts in their shells’ our whole ‘we travelled to Australia overland for my sisters wedding and now we are on our way home the same way we came’ story…

Something we’d realised we were doing a bit too much on the way out to Oz.

Every time someone would innocently ask us where we were going we’d launch into the ‘Well, we’ve travelled here overland…’

A bit tedious.

Obviously not if someone is genuinely interested but mostly people are looking for answers like, ‘Thailand’ or ‘Indonesia’ not a two minute monologue on the ‘joys of slow travel’.

On our way back we were doing much better and with porridge lady I just told her we were leaving tomorrow and thanked her for the delicious porridge, in slightly crap but vaguely understandable Mandarin : )

…and we bought six lots off her that morning so we could eat it for breakfast tomorrow as well.

Rosa and I did our morning lessons and gave our teachers little gifts, both of us grateful for the progress we’d made. We packed, got snacks for our journey and had our last CLI lunch.

…and in the afternoon, in one of the most extraordinary coincidences of our whole trip, Pascale, a friend of Theo’s from Frome, came to visit.

She had travelled to China to study Mandarin, leaving a few months after us, using our blog to help guide her some of the way overland. She had encountered the terror that is ‘Georgian minibus drivers’ and made it a good chunk of the way to China, when Russia refused to let her through. She tried two different routes but she had an eVisa which they wouldn’t accept (we didn’t even know you could get an eVisa for Russia. Boy would we have been bummed if that had been how easy it actually was to get in…)

Pascale was studying in Beijing, and had come on an adventure with a couple of the other women on her course. Almost unbelievably we coincided in Guilin, for one afternoon.

It was great hearing her adventures, and sharing some of ours, and then we went out in a big gang, to the Buddhist vegetarian buffet restaurant one last time. Pablo and Marcelo, Jency, Dominic and Pascale …and the three of us. Spain, Brazil, Canada, China, America, France and the UK out for a night out!

We set off early, so we had time to go back to the ‘Cat and Rabbit’ café and play a big game of ‘werewolf/mafia’ (way more fun than it sounds if you’ve never played it : )

Afterwards we wandered through the market, admiring all the stalls and the people dressed up in traditional costumes. With Jency’s help translating things for me I bought a couple of (very) small things for friends back home and then we had to get a move on.

The Buddhists like to go to bed early and our restaurant would be closing soon…

We had a great night, enjoying each other’s company and the beauty of Guilin city, meandering back through the centre of town past the Sun and Moon pagoda’s. There was a band by the river playing songs everyone knew and a really good saxophone player entertaining the throngs of people wandering around.

There were stalls of all kinds offering different food items, paintings of Guilin on bags, purses and stones, …and fans, lots and lots of fans.

I had been give my Chinese name by my teacher that morning and there’s a tradition in Guilin of telling the fan painter your name and getting a poem spontaneously written for you and printed in dipped ink onto a fan.

It had to be done – although I think the poet thought Jency was the one being written about…it was full of words about the beauty of nature and comparing that to me…(really?!) he was creating a work of art though, as he dipped his brush time and again. It was mesmerising even if I didn’t understand a word of it.

When we first arrived at CLI we noticed all the teachers had adopted English names – I guess to stop the students mangling their real names, and among the longer term students there were a handful with a Chinese name. Your teacher based it around your actual name …and what they saw of your personality.

Rosa and I qualified by coming back for a second time and I laughed out loud when my teacher gave me mine during that last lesson. My Chinese name is: Ké Qīng. Ké is my surname and Qīng means ‘sunny’ but the best thing about it was that you pronounce the Q like a ‘Ch’ which makes it sound like a word in English too…

Keching!

Exactly what we needed when we got home…easy money to come in quickly : )

My fan was finished and it was clear Rosa had had enough – she was struggling on the walk back, her grief beginning to take over.

It was good in a way to see just how sad she was feeling about leaving CLI, she loved it here and this second visit had shown her how quickly she could learn the language if she came back and stayed for three months or more, but right now, she didn’t want to leave…home still seemed a long way away.

Theo’s knee was hurting a bit too, so Rosa, Theo and Marcelo decided to go back in a taxi. Pascale said her goodbyes and Pablo, Jency, a slightly drunk Dominic and I, walked home.

Dominic is a 21-year-old Texan who decided to learn Mandarin because he and his mum had lived next door to a Chinese lady when he was growing up, and she’d always been kind to him.

He was brave with the language, incredibly sweet and open and great fun. He needed looking out for a little bit, he had a tendency to get hammered when he went out, and the interns and the slightly older students were looking out for him.

When I got back, Theo had been cooking, making food for tomorrow to go with our porridge, ready for our last big adventure.

We had decided to break the journey back to Kazakhstan by going via the Yellow Mountains and Mount Huashan – some of the biggest mountains in China. They had been on our radar since the first China tourist video we’d watched nearly a year ago now…

It was an early start the next day. For the third time in not very long, we were catching the 7.11 train to Guangzhou.

We waved goodbye to CLI in the rain, just as we had seven months ago. Quiet during the now familiar journey to Guilin Bei railway station.

We had ended up going back to Guangzhou because there were no trains on the route we were meant to take. I tried eleven cities before I thought of Guangzhou, which was in entirely the wrong direction, and luckily there was a train from there to the Yellow Mountains so we’d booked it.

We navigated the Guangzhou subway system one last time, Suitcase glad to be on the road again, and the ten hour journey passed easily enough. Two of us had window seats and we saw for ourselves the damage the floodwaters had done to this area of China.

We thought about all the people who had had to leave their homes and wondered when they would be able to go back, and what they would be going back to…

We arrived in Huangshan city at 9.00 pm and we struggled to book a taxi because the DiDi map couldn’t find our hotel. We guessed where it was in the end – picking the entrance to a warehouse storage place as the closest we could figure out …not a great place to spend the night if our taxi driver was in a hurry, but he wasn’t.

He checked the address and worked out where we really needed to go. He then drove us for over an hour through a torrential lightning storm, carefully and slowly, ‘and the award for the best taxi driver …is now shared between Mr Huangshan taxi man and the lovely man in Medan 🏆’

Our hotel was modest, and the staff curious, I don’t think they got many foreign guests. Our plan for tomorrow was to spend a night in a hotel on the mountain so we needed somewhere to leave our luggage and they were happy to help. Once they knew where we were going, one of the people working at the hotel offered to take us the ten miles to the entrance the next day.

Above and beyond, again!

The beauty of the Yellow Mountains is iconic, ‘The Sea of Clouds’ something everyone hopes to see at sunrise and the park doesn’t open in time to get up there. If we wanted to see a sunrise and a sunset, we had to stay overnight.

After Amsterdam, it was the most expensive hotel we booked, but a generous friend had recently given us some money towards the trip and we couldn’t think of a better way to spend some of it. (Although putting it towards buying a car when we got home, might have been a more sensible option, but we decided that was not what the money was intended for : )

We woke to a cloudy day and after a pretty weird breakfast of pickles, rice porridge, and doughy buns we left Suitcase in charge of the luggage and headed up the mountain. As we drove up towards the entrance we entered the clouds, would we climb above them in the cable car?

We thanked our generous driver and went to buy tickets. Both Theo and Rosa were given discounts which helped with the expense, and the ticket woman pointed towards a bus that would take us to the cable car.

We wandered through a maze of corridors designed to cater for several hundred tourists at a time and eventually arrived at the bottom of a very steep cliff. There was room for about thirty of us inside the car and seating for about fifteen so there was a little bit of shoving when we first got on, but most of the young men wanted to stand so it all worked out.

We sat in the mist for a couple of minutes and then we were off, and that cable car moved quick.

Rising steeply into nothing, just the cable visible as we moved at a pretty rapid rate, deeper into the clouds.

Each time we arrived at one of the metal pillars holding the cable in the air, our car would rock wildly accompanied by the screams of utter delight and complete terror from everyone inside, all of us relying on this little cage, held up by a pretty thin piece of wire, to stop us plunging to our deaths…

The cloud below us cleared briefly at one point and we got to see just how deep a drop that would be… More gasps and shrieks from inside our cable car.

We arrived at the top, still shroudded in mist with me having a new found respect for just how big clouds can be. We had travelled over a kilometre upwards in that short time and all the while we had been in the same cloud. I wondered how big clouds could get? One for the list…

The stillness and the quiet met us as we stepped out onto the mountainside, it was worth the heart stopping terror of a swaying cable car for this.

Two different types of birds crowded us straight away…’food please’ they said, we got out our ever present ‘peanuts in their shells’, which proved  very popular with these local residents.

There was a detailed map of the mountain on a sign near some steps leading down. We checked it against the map on my phone and decided we would head in the direction of ‘Cloud Dispelling Pavillion’ – seemed about right.

So many of the names for places on the route were evocative or mysterious, ‘Fly over Stone’, ‘Hundred Steps in Cloud’, ‘Alchemy Peak’, ‘Black Tiger Pine’.

Chinese culture is full of descriptions that bring the human and natural world closer, describing the majesty and reaching for something bigger than ourselves, which clearly this mountain was …even if we couldn’t see it.

The mist gave everything a magical quality and the bird song was incredible, the stillness quietening the human voices and giving space for their songs. There were blossom trees along the sides of the path and dozens of different coloured rhododendrons coming into bloom…and a happy, chatty Rosa, the cold and being back on the road having restored her to her normal self. As we started a new piece of ‘up’ Rosa pointed out that the three of us were not the only ones wearing stylish purple rain coats : )

‘Cloud dispelling Pavillion’ did not do what it said on the tin, if anything the cloud was a bit thicker, but there were squirrels there waiting to eat more of our nuts.

There was a small viewing alcove with brightly coloured padlocks attached to the railings. The same tradition existed here as in Australia – the last time we’d been this high up had been in the Blue Mountains and I went and stood next to the padlocks.

I thought about my sister attaching her heart shaped padlock to that railing the day her and Mike got married …remembering the engraving of the five names of our beautiful family, wishing they were here with us to see, well…nothing.

A whole lot of nothing.

Maybe they could come on a different day : )

We started to climb in the direction of ‘Flying Over Stone’. and each time we turned a bend in one of the wide, beautifully made walkways, there were more steps leading up. Rosa turned to us in triumph, our fifth floor room in Guilin had been great preparation!

Despite our wildly increased levels of fitness from those extra two flights of stairs at CLI, it was hard going, and we rested often. We weren’t in a rush and it wasn’t a good place to have a heart attack. We stopped at every lookout point we came to, and saw… Nothing!

We all said how lovely it was to be walking through the mist, ‘how evocative’, and that we’d ‘really missed this kind of weather’ – which was true, but I also knew we all secretly hoped there would be no bloody mist tomorrow morning.

We wanted to see where we were. Were the mountains yellow? Were there mountains out there at all?

…what was the cable car ride like in the daylight, could we see a sunrise, and please, please, please could we see the ‘Sea of Clouds’.

We really had no choice but to take our time walking up and down the mountain paths, stopping for snacks and to feed the birds; the orange and brown laughing thrushes, the blue bellied magpies and then our first sight of home – a great tit chirruping and bouncing along one of the benches.

There were several points along the way when I would have given some serious money towards installing an escalator, but each time a man would appear carrying twice my body weight on his head and I’d feel humbled…they were fit men and none of them were young. Maybe it took a long time to get calves of iron and legs of steel…

We did have a great time hanging out in the mist but by the time we arrived at ‘Bright Peak’, we were done and the hotel was still five hundred steps down from here. Our legs were properly aching and we (well some of us) were in desperate need of a cup of tea!

We walked into a slightly posher entrance lobby than we were expecting…we handed over our passports and after a minute of quiet confusion behind the desk we were told we were in the wrong building. We had booked into the B building and this was the A building. We were not surprised, we had gone for the cheapest room we could find and even a room in B building had been stretching our budget – this lobby did not look remotely ‘B’.

As we stood there, contemplating another walk, pray God, not up those 500 steps we’d just come down… an angel swooped in.

One of the women in the lobby, in a perfectly fitted suit and a jaunty little hat, was talking to the young man behind the counter. She turned back to me and indicated for us to share WeChat numbers.

‘I have upgraded you,’ she said. ‘Follow me!’

We followed her… Literally, LITERALLY, anything that meant we didn’t have to climb another step was balm to our aching feet and legs. She opened the door to a triple room that had everything we needed for the perfect stay in the Yellow Mountains.

There were umbrellas, a torch and padded jackets in the wardrobe to wear tomorrow morning when we got up at 4:10 to go and see the sunrise (yes 4.10!!). Our angels name was Huang Xinghua and she was very clear about what time we needed to get up.

She pointed to the toilet which had a whole load of dials and knobs next to it, that looked like fun – and under the sink the best thing of all, a big bucket to soak our feet in! ‘Your legs will be much better tomorrow if you soak them tonight!’

She told us there was a 55% chance of seeing the sunrise and a 55% chance of seeing the ‘Sea of Clouds’ tomorrow morning, she shared cctv lookout points via WeChat that showed the weather in real time (mist, mist, mist, and …mist!)

She brought us free snacks of fruit and tofu, she told us when the ‘Huizhou fish dance’ performance was happening in the lobby, and when dinner was served in the dining room. She was quick, efficient, generous…and slightly overwhelming!

I was the first to use the toilet and I sat down …on a heated seat! I have never before in my life encountered such a thing…I shot straight back up the first time, ‘what the…’ but I’m happy to tell you it’s pretty relaxing having your bum warmed as you sit on the loo…!

After resting for a couple of hours Rosa and I ventured out again for ‘sunset’. Ever hopeful, and this being our only chance to see a sunset in the Yellow Mountains, we walked to the closest viewing point, fifteen minutes up and plenty more steps…

We got to the top and looked around us – in the daytime you’d be able to see on both sides here.

Right now though ‘sunset’ just meant the mist was a bit darker.

We went back to our lovely room and took it in turns to soak our calves and feet. We went to the restaurant and ordered the cheapest thing we could find on the menu for dinner.

Back in the lobby we watched the slightly bizarre ‘fish dance’. Five woman in matching costumes carrying slightly menacing looking fish puppets on sticks above their heads and moving them up and down in time to the music… it was, odd, and we didn’t quite get it, but it was short which meant we liked it a little more…

Theo reminded us both about Morris dancing, and how that must come across to Chinese people.

Good point.

We walked back down our corridor, past the massage chairs, definitely getting me one of those tomorrow, and off to bed for an early night.

Maybe we’d have clear skies in the morning.

It was completely dark when we woke up. I went straight to the window and looked out. The trees opposite the hotel room were visible, had we been able to see them yesterday? None of us could remember.

We all got into our padded jackets, grabbed the torch, an umbrella and the rucksack Theo had packed last night, full of early morning nibbles (for us, the birds and squirrels), and stepped out into the cold morning.

We looked up …and could see the stars!!!

The five hundred steps up to ‘Bright Peak’ might not be exactly what we would choose as a start to our day but at least now it looked like it was going to be worth the effort. Surely we were fitter now and it would be easier? …we got out the torch and started to walk.

Slow and steady got us there. We were some of the first people to arrive at the top with the light beginning to turn the sky a gentle orange… we walked over to the lookout point and there it was, the ‘Sea of Clouds’ spread out before us.

It was utterly spectacular.

We were so high up and we could see mountains breaking through the clouds all around us. It would not have been possible to imagine that this ocean of beauty was even here last night…

Half an hour later as the first tiny sparkle of sun peaked up over the horizons edge a couple of hundred of us all gasped, simultaneously.

This daily moment of grace made more precious by our joint exclamation of wonder.

We stayed there for ages as the sun rose slowly. We listened to the gentle chatter of the people around us and to the songs of the mostly unfamiliar birds. We watched the sky and the clouds change colour, the suns rays bringing everything to life – and then, following our wonderful hostesses advice, we went for a walk.

We needed to be back down the mountain in good time to retrieve Suitcase and our luggage, and then into the city to catch our train to Xi’an the next day. This would be our only chance to go in the opposite direction to where the cable car would take us down the mountain.

Everywhere we went, the views were breathtaking, there was a little bit of the ‘we were blind and now we can see’ delight about it. The cloud and mist of the day before had shrouded the mountain in mystery, ready for the ‘big reveal’.

We loved it up here, the birds were not afraid, the wildlife was flourishing, and as we walked round past ‘Aoyu Fish Peak’ and on to ‘Lotus Pavillion’ the views were constantly changing, demanding our attention and our admiration.

The early morning is my favourite time of day, when I’m at my happiest, and to be somewhere so beautiful with Theo and Rosa quietly standing in awe of the beauty and magnificence was in the words of a great poet, ‘gurt lush!’

When Theo’s knee had given a clear indication it had had enough he encouraged us to carry on, Rosa agreeing to come with me down a ‘Hundred Steps in Cloud’ an incredibly steep stairway to see if we could get closer to ‘Lotus Peak’. The highest point in the mountains.

At the bottom of the steps we stopped for a moment to rest and we saw a creature. A creature with a long, dark bushy tail and a brown body… Slightly larger than a fox and definitely not something either of us had seen before. It walked casually up the sloping path, and away.

We still don’t know what it was, a binturong, a Pallas cat, a marten of some kind maybe? – whatever it was it felt perfectly safe and at home in those mountains. We hugged each other in the thrill of it and as we turned to continue on we heard a familiar voice coming from somewhere high above us.

Theo was waving from the mountain top… we waved back but we weren’t sure he’d seen us, we’d come a long way down already.

We walked until we’d walked enough and seen the far side of the mountain and then we did the long walk back up.

We ate an enormous breakfast back at the hotel and the lovely Huang Xinghua let us know we had three hours to rest before we needed to leave our room.

We made the absolute most of that time (including fifteen minutes in that massage chair) and then, after making sure we had left a fabulous review for Xinghua, it was time to leave.

Joy of joys, the five hundred steps to ‘Bright Peak’ were just the start of our journey back down the mountain. Hadn’t we done this once today already?

…and five hundred steps might not sound a lot but its the same as if you went up and down your stairs at home 40 times in a row and we did that twice before midday : )

It was hard to believe we were in the same place as we walked back past ‘Flying over Rock’ and ‘Cloud dispelling Pavillion.’ Like we’d been given 3D glasses and could see everything in glorious technicolour now…

Rosa wasn’t sure if she liked the mist or the view better. We decided both were great and we’d been really lucky to experience both… We were so grateful the weather had happened the way round it had – mist first and sun after.

We made it to the cable car just two minutes before it was due to leave.

We hadn’t bought tickets so one of the women and I ran down (and back up) three flights of stairs to the ticket kiosk…you cannot be serious?

After all that up and down? Out of breath doesn’t come close.

The cable car journey was a little scary but to mine and Rosa’s great relief less dramatic when we could see.

It was also great to be able to finally spot a slight yellowish tinge to the mountains as we headed down. The lowering sun warming the rock faces on the mountain slopes.

We got to the bottom with most of our finger nails still in tact – a good omen for the day after tomorrow, when we were planning to go on another cable car ride for our assault on ‘the deadliest plank walk’, and I don’t think any of us wanted to walk up Mount Huashan to get there.

Nerdy facts about clouds:

Clouds are pretty flippin big it turns out!