Our adventure began at a local trail that I discovered before work one afternoon while riding my bike around Sansia. I've come to internalize a few characters in Chinese and one of the most easily recognizable is the word for mountain, which is shan. It resembles the end of a fork with only three prongs and the middle prong slightly longer than the two on the side. It can be found splashed along the thousands of signs and store windows in Sansia.
I noticed a small alleyway leading into what looked like a jungle road which had a yellow sign containing this character and decided to see where it went. It took me on along a trickle of pavement just wide enough for a small truck to come barreling down the winding path and narrowly pass by my handlebars as it heads to town. After a kilometer or two a small dip in the road indicates a path that crosses the roadway which can be accessed through a hole in dilapidated barbed wire fence.
A few meters down the path and you are forced to cross a bubbling stream to reach the twelve foot waterfall which beckons across the way. Hanging down from this waterfall, from a tree no thicker than my calf is a tendril of rope with knots for handholds every few feet. When I came to the pool formed by the erosion of the surrounding rock that this waterfall slithers down and noticed the rope, I knew that I had to get to the top of that precipice. I used some tempered judgment and decided against climbing the slippery waterfall by myself, instead waiting until the weekend when Caleb and James could join me for the adventure.
They politely obliged.
So I find myself at the base of this waterfall once more, with the renewed confidence of my brother's in arms. We agreed that getting up the face of the slippery-wet rock would be easy, it was the possibility of descending the wall that scared us. After a few minutes of back and forth, we concluded that if all else failed, we could simply make a jump for the deepest point in the pool and, at worst, come away with a broken leg or less.
I grabbed hold of the rope and asked Caleb to toss me my shoes, which I'd removed to forge the pool in order to reach the base of the falls which I tied to my belt-loops and set to work finding a foothold with my toes. As we'd suspected, climbing the rock was incredibly easy, and within a few moments I was egging them on from the top.
After we'd reconvened at the head of the falls, we excitedly picked our way through the invisible traps of spider webs and under or over the many bamboo stalks criss-crossing the jungle stream. No more than fifty meters up the river we found ourselves faced with an even larger waterfall, with a sheer face that had few handholds and no rope. We marveled at the natural beauty of the slippery black stone and stood in the steamy silence of the verdant foliage around us. At this point, we could not hear a single bird call, animal grunt, mosquito buzz or car horn and the silence was somewhat off putting.
We hatched a plan to climb up the left bank of the small valley in which the stream resided and find an easier way over the second falls. This meant scrambling up an extremely muddy, completely inconsistent and ultimately conquerable incline where our ability to grasp onto any handhold or foothold meant the difference between failure and success. The raucous laughter we enjoyed during this bit of the fun was strikingly incongruous with the surroundings and I decided that the more noise we made the better, so as to scare off any potential predators which no doubt could stalk us easier than a pack of blind, deaf and dumb piglets.
We eventually found a path over the lip of the embankment and felt the chest swelling pride of real explorers as we made our way deeper into the jungle.
It would eventually take six waterfalls to bring us to our final destination. At one particularly inviting pool at the base of a trickling fall we decided it was time for a swim. We stripped down to our boxers and stepped tentatively into the surprisingly chilly water and squirmed as craw-dads (freshwater prawns) nibbled the dead skin from our feet. James was the first to make the plunge and stood ankle deep on the edge of the pool asking Caleb and I "Ok so, 3...2... what are we counting to?" "Um. One?" I offered helpfully. Caleb tossed me the waterproof camera and I set it to video-mode in order to capture the moment on film. "3...2...1!"
The water was only waist deep at the deepest end of the pool but James jumped with such excitement that he was submerged for a full second before surfacing again with a hoot and holler as he wiggled his feet away from the leaves and detritus that clung disconcertingly to this legs.
Caleb was next and finally it was my turn to make the plunge, which Caleb filmed.
Now. I did not know this at the time, but it turns out that after standing up out of the water after my dive, something personal to me was sticking out of the front of my boxers, revealed for the jungle and anyone in it to see. But like I say, I had no idea, and didn't until hours later when we were reminiscing about our day in a local bar and Caleb mentioned that my johnson was hanging out and that it might be on film.
But that's not important. Is it? Didn't think so.
We eventually found a small path no wider than two boots slapped together which lead us into the heart of the mountain where, finally, a cacophony of bird calls could be heard and it struck James that he had been waiting 24 years (It was his birthday on Saturday, the day of our adventure) for him to go from seeing this sort of thing on television to actually experiencing it in real life. He was a regular Tarzan out there too, he was shirtless the entire time despite the nagging insects and regular tumbles down muddy hillsides. A real warrior in my book.
After every conquered waterfall and each narrow victory over the landscape, we thought it wise to mention to each other that "coming back down this is going to be a bitch..." a thought that hung in our minds with every sucking step forward through the muck and the mire.
When it finally came time to turn around and head back to civilization, we did so with heavy hearts and less than assured nods of the head. None of us were eager to leave our hard earned territory in the wild and the thought of going back to a city full of the cloying sensory crush of smog, neon and various living material in various states of decay felt like a seriously deranged notion.
With a trudge we began our descent and were surprised to find that, though the trip in felt like it had taken hours to complete, our trip out took less than one. The waterfalls were no problem to tackle once we'd found their weaknesses and even the scary thought of standing backwards over a shallow pool atop a twelve foot high slab of moss slimed rock with nothing sturdier to hold onto than a rope the thickness of two shoe strings braided together turned out to be little more than a moments inconvenience.
We headed back down the winding mountain road with broad smiles, mud caked clothing and the slosh-sploosh sound of waterlogged boots thudding down the blacktop. Our heads held high, we knew that we'd just completed one of those adventures that would be worth telling about to our grandchildren, who would not care in the slightest about what their gray-haired slightly deranged grandpa had to tell them.
It was a good feeling. One of the reaffirming days that reminds me that what I'm doing is important, not necessarily world-changing, but for me it's exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be doing with my time. It gave me renewed vigor to head into the classroom on Monday and teach the hell out of those little kids, because if it weren't for their parents fervent belief in the strength of the English language and it's ability to provide opportunity for their tender little children, I wouldn't be allowed to enjoy this lifestyle.
Thanks kids!
(more pictures and possibly video to come when I get the images from Caleb's waterproof camera)
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