China 27

Huang Shan- Yellow Mountains- Anhui province

We had been walking for 5 or 6 hours already when we decided to climb our next peak- the journey up was, misleadingly, called “steps to heaven”. There were some very irregular steps ranging from 5 to 60cm in height and 5 to 8cm in depth (so “climbing aid” would perhaps be a more accurate description than “steps”), on each side nothing but a plunging views into thousands of meters of nothing but emptiness. We went up the first “flight of stairs” (maybe 150-200 “steps”) only to find it was hiding another, steeper one and then another and another and another. The more we went up the more we felt sick- everywhere we looked there was nothing but dropping views into the emptiness, we could not even see the end of the emptiness, my legs were wobbling, I felt like vomiting and the thought of going down was horrifying (going up, I could focus my vision on the next step…but going down I’d have little choice but to face the plunging views). I kept thinking of a time we had taken my grandmother skiing and got caught in a snow storm, my uncle (“Tonton Denis du Canada”) was devoting all his attention on keeping her mind busy so she would not panic, I could tell he was lying (“we are almost there”, "I can see the end of the slope" etc) but what mattered was that she did not realize how bad a situation we were really in because if she did, she would not find the energy to go on…well I kept thinking if he were there, although unsure himself, he’d tell me that everything was going to be ok just to get me to go up those flimmin’ steps. So many random thoughts entered my mind, I remember thinking “if I die here, I hope they get my memory card to my family, at least I won’t have died in vain”… eventually- those who know me will begin to understand how sick I must have felt- I even put my camera away as carrying anything which I could drop became unbearable as I imagined the two minutes that would go by before I would even hear the object crash…if I heard it at all…Physics was never my favorite subject but I was pretty sure that given the mass of camera, gravity’s pull, the altitude and all, if it took 2 minutes for my camera to reach the bottom, it probably meant a certain death if I were the one falling. (click on next picture to find out how we did not die eventually)