Changbai Shan

We left Harbin at about 7:30pm by train on Thursday night and arrived in Antu at 5:30am. From there, it was a 3 hour bus ride to Erdao Baihe and the Wangsong Hostel. Since theoretically we'd gotten a good night's sleep on the train, we had a full schedule Friday. We ate breakfast at the hostel, then left for the mountain. The first stop was Tian Chi, the lake in the crater at the top of Changbai Shan. This was the most striking scenery I've seen so far in China, from the waterfall we passed as we hiked up to the lake, to the very steep covered concrete staircase, to the amazing view from above the waterfall and overlooking the lake. For some reason I'm not able to load pictures to the blog right now, so you'll have to go to my album here to see them.

We paused in the grassy field above the waterfall so that Gu Mujun and Li Jiongzong could film part 2 of the kung fu epic that had begun on Maoer Shan. Maybe I forgot to mention that in other post, but it's not that complicated...when we got down from Maoer Shan, the creative energy was flowing. Out came the digital cameras and cheesy kung fu moves, followed by some good editing, superimposed chinese subtitles, and hey! it's a kung fu movie, roughly on a par with Jackie Chan's Police Story 2.

On the way down I paused to snap a photo of the hot springs. There were echoes of Yellowstone, but I don't remember seeing any eggs boiling in those springs...must be the Chinese touch. I asked the man why I should buy one, and he said there were health benefits. When I pressed for specifics, either my Chinese was bad or he was very, very vague.

After lunch it was off to another flatter hike, where we could see the "underground forest" or the waterfall. Unfortunately there was no time to see both, so I went for the waterfall. I know the underground forest sounds cooler, but actually it's not underground, just in a crater. Since we were already in the crater, I figured I wasn't missing too much. The waterfall was worth it. Check out the pictures, but it was sort of underground itself, plunging from ground level down to a lower tier of the forest, disappearing briefly under some rocks. Don't confuse it with the huge waterfall that went down from Tian Chi (the lake) to the valley floor.

After second hike, we went to a spot on the hot springs a little farther down the mountain. There was a building and pool system set up to take advantage of the hot water, so we peeled off our clothes and hopped in. Yes, it was gender segregated, and when I say peel off our clothes I mean all of them. There were showers as well as indoor and outdoor soaking pools. It was raining a little, and after the hike it felt pretty good soaking outside in the steaming water, raindrops hitting our faces punctuating the heat of the pool.

That night at the Wangsong Hostel, I was in a room with 6 guys and no beds. The situation was made slightly more interesting by the fact that we'd all been naked together earlier that day. Instead of beds, the floor was "kang", a sort of slightly soft raised platform that you can heat from underneath in the winter. It wasn't too bad, but I prefer a bed.

The next day we hit Yanji, northeast of Changbai Shan and very close to the North Korean border. The proximity was much more obvious than it had been at Changbai Shan. All the signs were in both Korean and Chinese, unlike Beijing where it's English and Chinese or Harbin where it's mostly just Chinese. I was happy just to walk around and look at stuff, but eventually I was defeated by Ren Feng, who said "All the cities in China are pretty much the same. Let's do something instead of just walking around." We ended up in the pool hall, which was fine because it started to rain anyway.

Dinner was at a Korean barbeque, which meant that they brought out raw meat and vegetables which we cooked ourselves on a sort of frying pan that was in the middle of the table. It was a pretty cool setup. A pan was set up over a bed of coals in a depression in the middle of the table. Overhead a fume hood took in the heat and smoke. Instead of cooking in that pan, some water went in and then a lid over that. I say lid, but it was the lid that we cooked on using the steam from the water in the pan. We wrapped pork, beef, squid, mushrooms, carrots, and cucumber up in big lettuce leaves and stuffed the whole mess down with whatever the sauce was...I can't describe it, except that it tasted Korean. It was tasty, but when all's said and done I prefer the cooks to do the cooking when I go out to eat.

The train left that night for Harbin, so we got back Sunday morning and had the day to recover before classes...hardly enough after that kind of nonstop action.