Stairway to heaven
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Set just half an hour's drive away from the town of Shangrao, any ascent to the peak is best begun by cable car. If your previous cable car experience is anything like mine - five minutes in close quarters to a quartet of candyfloss gobbling school kids whilst being winched across Blackpool Pleasure Beach - then the slow, majestic ascent of Sanqingshan is going to be something of a revelation.
It takes a good 45 minutes to complete the ride in one of the two-person capsules that endlessly cycle between the foothills and the foot ills that await you when you eventually begin your own two-legged ascent.
It is more than enough time to marvel at the succession of natural valleys that suddenly drop out below you, dramatically tugging away the comforting proximity of the terrain in favor of a yawning green chasm, dotted with the distant prospect of doughty locals taking the long way up. Against this natural spectacle, you have an equally compelling view of the sheer bloody-mindedness of the low-tech know-how that must have gone into building the cableway.
As something of a footnote, choose your co-cabiner with care - 45 minutes is a long time to make small talk in between sending "Oh my God!" twitters to a list of followers largely uncaring that you are tweeting to them from 900 m above sea level with only a 5 cm metal cable between you and a gory end in gorse bush far below.
Needless to say, by the time we reached our jumping-off point, I knew that my fellow Chinese passenger had been married for 7 years, had a daughter, 3, a husband who worked in accounting and that the Chinese word for mobile phone was "shouji". She knew that I was on my second marriage, had no children and that the English for window was, eh, window.
Scrambling from the cabin at the terminal and blinking up at the summit, it is clear there is still an awful lot of Mount Sanqingshan to go.
The rough granite-hewn steps that lead up to the path that circles the mountain are undoubtedly the toughest part of the trip. By turns steep, then steeper still, negotiating the stone stairway is not for the under-nourished or the over-burdened.
Depending on your recovery time and need for rest breaks, this part of the tour takes between 45 minutes and an hour and a quarter. Regardless of your respiratory requirements, it soon becomes apparent that Sanqingshan is a very special place and readers of China's National Geographic may well have not been talking entirely through their ski pants when they singled out its natural beauty.
Almost as impressive as the scenery itself is the spectacle of the phalanx of the fruit and vegetable-laden porters that wend their way up the mountainside, balancing some 50 kg worth of carrots, potatoes or eggplant on each shoulder. Employees of a rival concern, they are denied access to the cable car and begin their ascent at the very foot of the mountain.
Long before its economic import, the mountain and its environs were sacred to the Taoists. Today the mountain is still home to a number of Taoist monuments and an active temple, where the weary can rest and, for a few yuan, pluck a parchment said to reveal, if a little cryptically, their ultimate destiny.
