Emei Shan

After Leshan we had an early morning and made the short journey to Emei Shan. It is a mountain of 4 peaks that is littered with monasteries, many thousands of years old which apparently date back to the beginning of Buddhism. The thing to do here is climb up the mountain which has many different routes all composed of thousands of steps, see all the monasteries, and try to time your arrival at the summit to see sunrise. It is a great hike (if you can call it that considering its all in steps), and one heck of a work out. We climbed long and hard the first day up what seemed to be an endless number of stairs for something like 6-7 hours.

A little view of what it was like... Look at all those stairs!Taking a break, I was completely and utterly knackered.Along the way you have to deal with these bastards as well. They aren't friendly, and they want your food. The Chinese have a great way to deal with them also which really helps. They sell food to Chinese tourist whom feed the monkeys, and then when they get to aggressive and want more food, they beat them with sticks. Our first run in with the monkeys we saw one more-or-less attack a lady from behind jumping onto her back! And this wasn't a small monkeys. We didn't have bamboo sticks for walking, we had them for protection/self defense. I would like to reiterate how much I hate monkeys...A pretty view along the way. One of many monasteries. We spent the night not far from this monastery. Early the next morning we cheated to get to the top for sunrise. We had to get up at 4:30 am though to try and get a glimpse of the sun coming up from the summit. However that was only if we took a cable car up final and last section to save us 2 hours. We weren't about to get up at 2:30, and we were pretty beat from the climb from the day before so we sucked up our pride and jumped on the cable car. You can see from the picture what kind of weather we were dealing with though.Jillene celebrating our summit, very early in the morning before sunrise...

Still waiting for that sun... In the end, it was so socked in the sun rose, but never showed it's face. We got up early for nothing! Oh well we still have the climb down to look forward to.
This was the climb down! At times (because we were still pretty tired from the day before) that we did more going up than down. We did however finally reach the bottom, and were rewarded with some pretty views along the way.
There was a great temperature difference from the top to the bottom. We had to bundle up at the top, and strip down as we descended. Here's another pretty pick taking during the hike.

Overall it was a great and memorable hike. It was pretty hard to forget actually as our legs were killing us for the next week!