After the temple Michelle was still feeling a little under the weather, so she stayed in town to shop and check out the giant prayer wheel (photos to follow) while the rest of us jumped into the nearest cable car and headed up into the mountains.
The cable car trip was broken into 2 sections and tops out at over 4,500m above sea level. Our tour leader, Benny, was initially only going to come as far as the first stop as she wasn’t dressed for the cold, but it was suprisingly warm and sunny, so she took us all the way to the top. At 4,500m the air was pretty thin, and I got light headed trying to scale the first few steps outside the platform. I had to switch to taking deep breaths through my mouth as the nose just wasn’t cutting it. Thankfully Michelle had bought me a scarf when I had a cold in Lijiang, and it sure came in handy.
The top of the mountain was still covered in snow, and the path would frequently disappear underneath the ice. The cold wind also made our noses run, giving us some fetching snot icicles. Despite being the most underdressed, Benny didn’t seem to feel the cold and was throwing snowballs around. I had no gloves and had my hands firmly tucked in my jacket pockets whenever I wasn’t taking photos.
From the mountain top you can see 13 other mountains in the region, but if you were to count all the visible peaks it would number in the dozens. It was a cool experience, even if the cable car ride was a bit scary. The cars would sway in the wind and often the line would stop if the wind got too high. Everyone was recalling Michelle’s comments about Chinese engineering, and there were some white knuckles on the hand rails. On the trip down the first car in our group was just a wooden platform. As we were wondering whether they had forgotten to build the first car, a soldier (there are a lot of these in China) came and loaded a bin full of rubbish on to the platform, and so for our entire return journey we had a big stinking pile of rubbish spoiling our view!
