Today was easily my favorite day of the whole trip! Mount Emil is very large and steep! A fellow traveler said he was going to hike the whole mountain and expected it to take 12 hours. Even while staying at the base of the mountain, there was no way we would have enough time to hike all the way up. So we opted into taking a bus two hours up the mountain. I estimated this would leave us to hike for 1.5 hours to reach the summit. Little did I know the physical challenges that awaited us!
At least the hike started off with some good laughs about the warning signs posted along the path!
(The sign states: Loving life. Don’t turn round the hand rail.)
Our first challenge was the fog. I was convinced that the fog would lift after mid-morning, but I was wrong. Although we could see the path, all day it was difficult to see further up the mountain or even the view!
Our next (and hardest) challenge was actually hiking up the mountain. In my mind, I was picturing lots of dirt paths and switchbacks. What we got were stairs. Lots of stairs going straight up the mountain. Because of this unforeseen development, it took us 3 hours to hike up the mountain instead of 1.5 hours. My friend Karen and I joked that we just did 3 hours of stairmaster!
During one of our many breaks, we encountered this little creature. Once he saw we were eating, he came searching for scraps by our feet!
Today was quite a rainy and foggy day. The further up we climbed, the faster the degrees fell. Soon we noticed snow on the ground! As I was walking, I snatched some up to munch on as we slowly climbed the steps.
Getting close to our goal, The Golden Summit!
We made it but our view was horrible due to the fog! This is what it was supposed to look like though hahah!
We thought we were at the top, but we saw a few more steps leading up to the left. We’ve come this far, might as well climb to the very top! As we made are way around the bend, I was very confused. We started to see elephant statues..on top of a mountain.
We continued halfway up the steps before we saw these beautiful red candles flickering in the fall wind.
As we climbed the last few stairs, I saw a dark outline of something ahead. That was literally all I could see. More and more people came into view and then we saw it! On top of a mountain! This!
This is a Buddhist Temple. To give you more perspective of its size, the bottom part which has hundreds of jars of candles lit, is where people can walk in. We were all pleasantly surprised to see this beautiful temple on top of a mountain.
Although there were Buddhists praying, there were also hikers and locals enjoying themselves! This little boy started a snowball fight with his mom.
The way down the mountain was a lot easier compared to going up. What took us 3 hours to climb up took us only 1 hour to walk down. I don’t like to use this phrase but I don’t know how else to describe it. We were high on life. We just burnt through so much energy but had to finish climbing down, our bodies defaulted on adeneline. I yelled 加油 (jiayou), which is similar to ‘let’s go,’ to EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON I passed on the way down! I wanted them to make it to the top as well to see what I just saw!
I started to sprint down the hill in order to get rid of my extra energy. I almost missed it but one person in our group saw a wild monkey which are known to live on the mountain. I snapped a quick picture of it balancing on the fence before it made it’s way down a steep hill.
I had an absolute blast climbing up the mountain and being surprised by the temple on top! After we made it all the way down, we had been hiking for 5 hours. Naturally, we celebrated by eating some very traditional Chinese cuisine of chocolate and banana pancakes 🙂