Tian Ping Shan

 About two blocks away from our apartment is the Eastern end-of-the-line for city bus #4.  If you get on the bus at that stop and ride to the Western terminus you will travel for about 15 miles as the crow flies.    The bus snakes its way through busy streets so that the trip takes about 75 minutes and probably covers 20 or more miles on the road.  You cross the old city of Suzhou on the South side and then traverse the entire Suzhou New District.  It's a cheap trip at 2 RMB - only about 30 cents.  (You gotta love the price of public transport.)

 At the other end of the line is Tian Ping Shan, a hill of about 800 feet that has become a public park and scenic area.  Shan in Chinese (山is the character) means a mountain or a hill and anything in between.  The land around Suzhou is so flat that 800 feet qualifies as a mountain of sorts.  Tian Ping Shan is one of many shans that ring Tai Lake and create a hard barrier limit to Suzhou's Westward growth.

 A payment of 10 RMB buys you a ticket to enter the park and climb to the top.  The area is almost entirely tree-covered and seems pristine and rustic, though nothing is China is truly undisturbed by man.   People have been crawling through these hills and building trails and temples and fortifications for thousands of years.  It is still a bit of a sacred place.  (In the top photo, that is a Buddhist monk on the stairs ahead of me.)  At the foot of the hill are several temples and tea houses and attractions (horseback riding, archery, playground for children, and so on.).  There are also several paths leading up Tian Ping Shan.

 A good portion of the climbing trail is covered with stair steps, placed upon or carved into the mountain stone.  But don't mistake that as making this an easy climb.  You are never more than one step away from having a really, really bad day.   Many of the stone steps are worn smooth as glass.  The path is slippery when it is dry....I can hardly imagine it on a typical rainy Suzhou day.  Safety features are non-existent.  If you slip and fall, then it becomes a contest between you and gravity.  Gravity will probably win a convincing victory.

 Still, it was a nice day and the opportunity to climb was impossible to resist.  So I lumbered up the steps and squeezed between the narrow passages with deliberate slowness.   There were quite a few local folks out enjoying the day too.  Just to humiliate me, they climbed with reckless abandon and no fear whatsoever.  Parents let their kids scurry over rock faces.  Women in skirts and dress shoes danced past me on the steepest parts.

 Along the way there were little shrines and grottoes for those who were climbing for mystical reasons.  For the tourists, there were a lot of places to look down upon the town of Suzhou below.  As you can see from the photo above, the visibility was not good.  Days of celebration had not helped the situation.  I figure the 6 million residents of Suzhou blew up a couple of million pounds of black powder and maybe burned again that much incense at the temples.   The newspaper said that the pollution index had gone off the charts during the New Year festival - particulate levels were over 5 times higher than the normal health alert limits. 

  As I kept climbing, I was filled more and more with a sense of pride and accomplishment.  The burn my thigh muscles was giving me an exercise high.  And the city below seemed like a small thing, a distant world of mere mortals.  And I was now high enough to see the other shans to the West toward Tai Lake.   I figured that there would be a place at the top to do high-fives with all the other supermen that conquered the mountain.

Pride goes before the fall.  Just to burst my bubble, at the top of the mountain were a bunch of carnival game booths and trinket shops.  There were little kids playing ring toss for prizes.  There was a place to shoot at balloons with a BB gun.  And all these booths were run by people my age or older.  I figure that every morning at sunrise they strap all this stuff on their back and hump it up the side of the hill.  And every evening the go back down again.  After about 15 minutes at the top, I packed up my wounded ego and stumbled back down to the bottom.