Celebrating the Year of the Snake with Monkeys on Our Backs

I spent Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) touring in and around western Sichuan with a student and her family. When halfway up  Mt. Emei, I finally understood the phrase "monkey on your back." These thirty-pound thieves would fly out of nowhere, landing on our backs, trying our zippers and taking what goods they could. Lei Shu Yan (above) is about to lose his water bottle--just moments before I lost mine.

More amazing than the mischievous monkeys was the spectacular scenery on Mt. Emei, a series of steep slopes jutting into and above the mist. Amazing, too, is the legacy of Chinese Buddhism here.

The lower region of Mt. Emei has lush vegetation, crystal clear streams,
and numerous Buddhist temples and monasteries.

The higher we rose, the colder and mistier it got. Snow (visible above) and ice followed.

Waiting for us at the very top was the Golden Buddha, distinctly visible at sunset

. . . but not so visible the next morning when we joined throngs of others in the freezing cold to see the legendary sunrise. We needed crampons to descend the hundreds and hundreds of icy stone steps.
(Below see three of our party.)

 Earlier in the week we visited the seventy-meter Buddha carved into a mountain in Leshan--you can see his fingernails on the right. A single toenail could easily host a party of a dozen or so visitors.

The Buddha of Leshan lords over the confluence of three rivers--below is a bridge over one of them.

Throughout the week, JiaYue's family extended unbelievable hospitality. Her parents hosted numerous banquets on our behalf (she has just been accepted by several of the world's top schools for graduate school), several different "uncles" covered expenses for passes here and there, and her grandmother hosted the large extended family for days of feasting in nearby Dujiangyan, also home to a two-thousand year old successful engineering marvel, an irrigation program that made Sichuan one of China's rice bowls for millennia. We went to one awesome place after another for days. More on all that later.

But back to monkeys. Who knew I'd have two "monkeys on my back" when navigating the insanely crowded trains and buses back to Beibei. The first "monkey" was what is sometimes euphemistically called "traveler's revenge," something that can be explained by my non-stop feasting, some of it on street food, and something that resulted in perhaps 35 trips to the pot the night before. With squat toilets on crowded, swaying trains, I dared not ingest one drop of anything the morning before leaving.
 
The second "monkey" was the very hospitality I just raved about. Consider JiaYue's grandma. I could write a book about this sweet woman, but my eyes grew rounder and rounder as she made a dozen trips from the kitchen and elsewhere to our stash of backpacks and luggage, bringing us more and more gifts to bring home, including many bags of her frozen home-made tang yuan and jiaozi, both of which I love. Then the big box of juices she thought I'd like. Then the four books the very sweet "brothers" gave me—one each of the four great classics of Chinese literature. Each one maybe half the size and weight of a typical dictionary. (Under any other conditions, I'd be thrilled to have these particular tomes.) Then Grandma emerged with a big plastic container of toffee candies and some bags of delicious dried meats. The other family members looked very somber as Grandma kept padding back with more, but they felt helpless to stop her.

So, in my totally dehydrated and weakened state (because of my first "monkey"), I shouldered my backpack, grabbed my suitcase and wondered where I'd be able to stash the ungodly colossal plastic bag with the broken zipper holding all this incredibly sweet Chinese hospitality (my other "monkey"--dear as it all was).

I shouldn't have worried. We did have to navigate some long stairs in several train stations, but it somehow worked out. Everyone else had more than they could carry, and at least there were no live ducks peeking out of my bag.

Home in Beibei, I can begin to reflect on the scores of sacrifices JiaYue's family members made on my behalf and how patiently they tried to help me understand their sentences and how vigilantly they looked after my every need. It's 2013. The Year of the Snake.