香山（The Fragrant Hills)

This past Sunday a bunch of us trekked out to the Fragrant Hills, which is the mountain we see every day on our commute to Tsinghua (assuming that the air is clear). Luckily the air was really clear, though it was a bit cold.  We got there at the tail end of the best time of year to see the mountain since the leaves were all autumn-colored.

First we went to a Buddhist temple that was structured like your typical ancient Chinese space with a long series of courtyards joined by corridors where the further inside you went, the more sacred the space.

Some people lit incense in the first courtyard area.

They weren’t sure what to do with it once they’d lit it so Aaron’s Chinese language partner explained that you lit the incense, bowed three times, and put them in with the rest of the incense after praying.

This particular temple attracted a mix of tourists who had no clue what was going on and fairly devout people who kowtowed before the statues of Buddha.

In the innermost courtyard was a giant temple that we had really wanted to go into, but it was closed.

After the temple, we walked through the park to one of the paths that would take us to the top of the mountain.

Although first we got a bit distracted and ended up sitting by a pond for a while.

There were a ton of people at the mountain, that day since it was the most popular season to go.

Although actually it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  And the mountain was so big that, depending on the trail we took, we didn’t run into too many people.

Although at one point we ran into quite a lot of people because we had gone off the path through the winding trail in the woods that we eventually realized didn’t join the main path again unless you scaled the wall.  And so we stopped with everyone else at this particular juncture and hauled ourselves over with varying degrees of pain.  (And I helped not at all by sitting on top of the wall and playing ukulele.)

Finally we made it to the main path from which you could get some really spectacular views of Beijing.

It’s hard to comprehend from within the city just how massive Beijing is.  At one point, for example, it was nestled securely in mountains surrounding it on three sides.  Now it curls around the mountains and goes on seemingly forever.

Here is the chairlift that we did not get to take on the way down the mountain because it was closed due to the wind.  Which was sort of okay because it was pretty costly, anyway, but we had also just hiked up an entire mountain before being told that we would then have to hike back down the mountain.

You can’t see very well in this picture, but we actually found our apartments, the Summer Palace, the World Trade Center, and the CCTV tower.

In any case, we eventually made it to the top where it was very cold and quite crowded.

The view on the other side of the mountain was stunning as well.

I also got this great picture.

(I have no idea who these people are.)

At the bottom of the mountain again, we walked down the street leading to the busses eating everything in sight.

Some choice 小吃 were: mango ice cream, glutinous rice shaped onto a stick and coated with a different topping on every side, knife-shaved noodles, baozi, and a peanut brittle-type thing that’s made by pounding the hell out of the ingredients with a giant mallet.

For the video version of this trip, go here!