Mountains Gone Wild
NOTE: An extremely toned down version of this story appeared in the April 2004 edition of that’s Shanghai magazine.
by DAN WASHBURN
Girls! Girls! Girls! — Motley Crue (1981-2000 AD), “Girls, Girls, Girls”
There is a place with no crowds, no skyscrapers, no trash on the ground — and it’s only a four-hour drive from Shanghai. If Hangzhou is Shanghai’s backyard, then Lin’an, with its comparatively organic surroundings, is the city’s secret clubhouse up in a tree. You won’t find this quirky city of 500,000 in any of your guidebooks, and that’s exactly the reason you should go. Located in northwest Zhejiang Province, Lin’an is the perfect jumping off point for a day spent exploring grand and green Tianmu Mountain. Head back into town after dark to take in its curious and compelling nightlife. (There is a disco bar in Lin’an that has a dance floor that glows and bounces up and down … and barely bedraped dancing girls — two of them, at least — who do things that haven’t been done to a pole since Roman Polanski slept over at Jack Nicholson’s house.)
Depending on your negotiating skills, it’s fairly easy to find a cab or bus that will take you on the hour-plus ride from Lin’an to Tianmu Mountain. We agreed to pay our driver RMB 55, but ended up paying him RMB 70 after our sometimes seemingly impassable path made his Volkswagen emit strange noises and a little bit of smoke. The driver who took us back to Lin’an later in the day knew of an alternate, somewhat smoother, route. Still, it’s a good idea not to eat much prior to either leg of the journey. Roads are tiny and windy in the mountains. And Lin’an’s cabbies make Shanghai taxi drivers look like poster boys for good decision-making.
It is possible, but not recommended, to throw some more money at your driver to avoid the sometimes-laborious-but-always-alluring hike up the mountainside, which gains roughly 750 metres in elevation from the foot of the mountain to a parking lot near the old and relatively empty Chanyuan Temple. This is the 1,000-metre mark, where tour groups and signs in English make their first and — on our trip in early March, at least — last appearance. Behind the temple, the mountain rises another 500 metres to Fairy Zenith, the 1,506-metre summit of West Tianmu Mountain. A trek to the top is worth the extra 90 or so minutes it will take you to get there, although your aching legs will likely try to tell you otherwise.
To skip the hiking is to miss the mountain. It’s a nature reserve, home to more than 4,000 species of plants and animals, some on endangered lists. Tianmu Mountain is one of the only places in China where Ginkgo biloba trees grow in the wild. It’s also a prime place to pick China’s most-valued sex-enhancing botanical, the horny goat weed — which, come to think of it, might actually come in handy back at the Lin’an disco club. (One species that was oddly absent during our ascent: human beings. The only person we encountered along the trail was an old man living in a rundown maintenance shed. He invited us inside for lunch.) Clusters of huge Japanese cedars tower above the trail, occluding the cloudless sky above. Some 400 trees here have trunks that measure at least one metre in diameter. Everything about Tianmu Mountain is big — the place has prompted several prominent poets and scholars to climb its peaks and ponder their place in the world.
Hopefully they didn’t do this during wintertime, because there’s a good chance they would have slipped and fallen and impaled themselves on one of their pencils. When it’s cold out, the top of Tianmu Mountain turns to ice — this was the case two months ago. All things green become white. And the already formidable final 500-metre climb becomes a real pain in the ass. Every branch, every leaf, every needle of every evergreen is coated in a layer of ice. Beautiful to look at, but quite a bitch to burst through when they are so bogged down that they block your path. But all the work is worth it when you finally catch a glimpse of your goal. Fairy Zenith looked like a fairyland back in early March, like a strange ice palace floating in the sky.
The old man who minds the ice palace (which is really a weather station) doesn’t expect visitors during this time of year — especially not one 189 centimetres tall and as white as the snow on the ground. But he seemed happy to have the company and particularly keen on his guest’s digital camera. He proudly showed off his backyard, which must rank as one of the best in the world. There’s not a bad seat in the house. It’s all Tianmu, all the time. The peaks are not odd and imposing like the ones found at Huangshan — which, on a very clear day, you can see from Tianmu’s western peak. Instead, they are broad, rolling and resplendent. Reports from a more recent trip said the ice was all gone, but the views were still there — along with the old man on the mountain.
Lin’an’s dancing girls were still there, too, along with their poles. (And no, even though Lin’an is also known as “bamboo town,” don’t expect the poles to be made of wood. The splinters would be too painful.) Still, watching these girls strut their stuff is stranger than any spectacle a mountain can offer. Sure, scantily clad women can be found sexing it up around poles all over the world … but in China? Odder still is the fact that, for large chunks of the night, the pole dancers go largely unnoticed. The crowd comes for the dance floor, a small circle they storm when the DJ gives them the go ahead. Packed with people, the floor sits on springs and bobs up and down to the music. There are no individuals out there. There is no room to display a new move. The flux of the floor makes that all but impossible, anyway. It’s just one big mass of people, all dancing to the same beat. And, considering the surroundings, it seems rather fitting.
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On the web: www.cntms.org
Getting there: Lin’an is in northwest Zhejiang Province, less than an hour by bus from Hangzhou. Buses from Hangzhou’s west bus station (chang tu qi che xi zhan, I believe) run basically all day long and cost RMB 9-11 for the 45-minute trip. I took the very roomy and comfortable RMB 40 train from Shanghai’s Mei Long station to Hangzhou (2 hours). You can then take a bus or cab to the west bus station. Buses are also available direct between Shanghai and Lin’an. People who have traveled that route tell me that buses leave from Shanghai to Lin’an at 7 am and 2 pm daily. Not sure from where they leave or how much they cost. Buses from Lin’an to Shanghai leave at 7:20 am (No. 58) and 9:30 am (No. 39), according to my source. (Might want to have someone who speaks Chinese double check all this.)
Tip: If you want to go to the disco bar — and really, there’s nothing else to do — it’s called Focus and it’s address is 520 Cheng Zhong Lu, near Lin Tian Lu. It’s in the thrid floor of the Jingdu Hotel. Afterward, head on over to a late night massage parlor at Room 101, Unit 2, Wen Jin Building on Lin Tian Road.
1 Comments
Enjoyed you write up very much, just starting to get to know more about China and may be coming to live in Lin’an, or possibly Shanghai within the next year, so any info would be appreciated. Your web-site is very interesting and I will log on as often as I am able.
Many thanks
Bob