We Climbed A Mountain

This year Easter and the Chinese Tomb Sweeping Festival (Qing Ming Jie - 清明节） happen to fall on the same day. This meant, for once, we were on the same holiday time as the West and actually had part of the weekend free. For me this also meant that my boyfriend and I had a full day where we both had time off from work. To take advantage of the situation Orion and I decided to head to the Helan mountains (贺兰山) just outside Yinchuan to do some hiking. Despite being from Yinchuan, Orion has never been to this part of the mountains so when we met up with Jake and Becky and set off (after a Tomb Sweeping lunch with Orion's mum) it was an adventure for everyone.

I had expected that our hike would be made up of trails and steep steps but this wasn't tourist hiking, this was literally scrambling up a mountain. For a while it looked like there was a path that was going to lead us onwards and up, but then that crude path sort of dissolved until we were standing at the bottom of a valley of rocks. No distinguishable path remained and after some discussion we decided that this is China and that this probably was the right way to go and, hell, it looked fun! Scrambling across rocks and rogue patches of ice we were doing pretty well, and then we met the rock to end all rocks. Another hiker had said that there was one rock that was a little hard to get over, but we weren't expecting an almost perfectly cuboid rock three times my height, and full of slippery sides and sharp edges.

Then we noticed the rope...
Someone at some point had embedded a rope into the rock so that insane people like us could haul their bodies over to the other side.
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I massively lack any upper body strength so the idea so using my arms to pull myself up a rock without dying was slightly nerve racking. But we were there, there was no way under it, no way around it, the only way was up and over or back; and going back was not an option. In the end it wasn't actually too difficult to get over the rock and I emerged from the other side like a conquering hero to the sound of Becky's "oh my god"s coming from the other side of the rock. She hadn't though to tell us she was terrified of heights before committing to hiking a mountain! But Becky made it over the rock, probably with less difficultly than I did, and we continued on, still in one piece.

After the rock debacle the elusive trail slowly returned and we were back to climbing on well trodden ground again. After climbing up a hell of a lot of steps we reached the Little White Tower, 小白塔, and the peak of our hike for the day. The views across the mountains were impressive and it's amazing that we have such natural beauty less than an hour outside of the bustling city. After taking in our fill of the scenery and taking the obligatory victorious photos we made our way back down the mountain,  via a tiny temple nestled between peaks. The juxtaposition of bare rocks with the colourful flags and painted eaves made seeing yet another temple that bit more exciting, and the break to wander around of flat ground was also definitely welcome!

When we went to the mountains we didn't know what to expect, but whatever expectations we had in our head the reality was better. Next time we want to take our hikes further and spend a full day in the mountains, rather than the few hours we had for Tomb Sweeping Festival. Our adventure was a good introduction to the mountains but with a sprawling range reaching into Inner Mongolia there's still plenty more to explore.