The weekend after my return to China, I asked my friend Hao if she wanted to go hiking to get out of the city. I had kind of had a small amount of culture shock again when I returned to the pollution and noise that is Beijing, and felt like escaping. I picked out a place that sounded lovely in the tour book, and since she speaks Chinese, we were able to get on the correct 900 bus to ensure a quick arrival...and then there were traffic jams. And more traffic. We were crawling, and our hoped-for 11 am arrival got pushed to 12...still, we were moving, albeit slowly, so what could we do? Then around 12:30, the bus came to an actual halt, and opened to the doors. I was surprised - are we there? Oh no...upon standing up, I saw a line of cars stretching onwards towards infinity, farther than the eye could see. We sat in silence for a few minutes, then started debating - to stay or go? Neither of us wanted to give up our day trip, but no one knew when the line of cars would start moving again.
We finally decided to give up and got off the bus and started walking back through the traffic that had already accumulated behind us. All the cars were stopped with people standing around in the road, eating, sunning, going to the bathroom...To make it worse, cars trying to pass the jam had pulled up in the lanes reserved for the other direction, so no one could drive the other way either. We passed several cars trying to turn around, and they kept hitting cars around them, resulting in angry shouting and gesticulating. It took us 25 minutes to walk back out of traffic! People in stopped cars kept asking us what was ahead, and Hao kept telling them to turn around while they still could.
We eventually got lucky - they had told us the closest bus stop behind us was 10 km away - quite a walk, but better than sitting, and we had been planning on doing an 11 km hike anyway that day. But after about 30 minute of walking, we encountered a bus turning around, and managed to flag it down to drive us back away from the jam. I had noticed on the way there that we had passed the park that Max and I went to in October, Fang Shan, so we decided to go there to hike rather than completely giving up on our day. We didn't get there til 2 pm, but we still had a fun time climbing the mountain, going in the cave with resident Buddhas, and taking the lift down again with some dazzingly views.
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| The outside of the Water Cloud Caves |
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| Buddhas in the cave |
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| Touristy lighting in the caves |
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| Tired after the hike up the hill |
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| The view down from the lift |
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| The view up behind us from the lift |
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| Mountain goats we saw from the bottom! |
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