I walk to work each morning and on my way to work I look up at Laohe Shan and think, ‘I wish I was up there’. I did the same thing this morning but this time the thought ‘I wish I was up there’ was immediately followed by ‘gosh, up there doesn’t look as tall as it used too’.
It was a tall weekend, 7 hashers setting off on Saturday to attempt to hit all 14 of Hangzhou’s 1000ft hills in one day. We only hit 10 but it was as good a day’s walking as you’re going to get in constant, teeming rain. Despite the packs knowledge of the hills of Hangzhou it was sadly navigational errors that did for us.
Sunday we were off on Hentai’s Magical Mystery Tour, disappointingly 6 of the 7 from Saturday FAILED to show up on Sunday and DOWN DOWNs await them. So it was that a depleted pack (A, H, Pushup, PhoneBox, 7Up) made the long arduous journey out to Hentai’s secret location.
The secret location turns out to be a small village (some how villages in Zhejiang never quite manage to achieve quaint do they?) in the Daqing valley, a new location for all of us.
A well used tourist trail ran west out of the village and in to the bamboo forest, we were on chalk and away. But not for long. A few hundred metres in and we’re off chalk. Back to good chalk, no, we’ve not missed a touring. Spend ages looking round, exploring every possible turning off the trail before deciding the work-shy-fop of a hare hasn’t set a trail at all. Unanimously the pack decides that the best course of action is to follow the stone stairs all the way to summit which we did. The route up and the summit affording amazing views of the valley, mountains and the river, batteries being rapidly drained on cameras as the sun gets lower in the sky.
Nagging sensation in the back of mind that I’m missing something important here.
The trail emerged at a small, very communist looking concrete pavilion on a ridge that runs north-south (south-north if you’re Chinese). The pack quickly decide to head north up to what looks like the summit proper in search of views of the hills to the North and West.
From the summit I get my first true appreciation of how much more there is to the hills around Hangzhou, that we’ve just dipped our toe in with the stuff we’ve done that immediately borders the city.
That’s what it is, the sun’s going down! We’ve got about 20 minutes of day light left we’re at the top of a hill, off chalk and we need to get down quickly.
Push-up’s improbable-but-somehow-just-about-passable-trail detector goes off and we clamber over some rocks into the gloom of tree cover at twilight. It’s steep, very steep and as we make our way down I increasingly can’t work out the detail of what I’m stepping into. This is boar trap country and I now can’t look at what I’m stepping on even if I want to. The hills ring out to On On as the small pack attempt to track each other’s progress down the ridge. Somehow we manage to emerge at the bottom and back on to the tourist trail just as the light fails us completely. The timing couldn’t have been tighter. A short 1k run in takes us back to an awaiting hare.
The hare, in his defence claims to have set a trail that took a circuitous route up to the pavilion and then came down by the southern ridge. Down-downs were nonetheless awarded as we saw absolutely no evidence of this. 7Up appeared to be on a mission to get everyone wasted filling everyone’s glass except her own as full as possible.
The pack were rewarded with a dinner including wild boar (shot, not trapped, we wouldn’t to encourage that now would we) and we finally adjourned to Maya for 1 or 3.
On On
DoggieStyle.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.