Climbing at Yangshuo
I’m pretty out of it today. It’s our climbing day, perfect sunshine and blue sky. I’m curled up in the shade of the bamboo trees, resting on my rain jacket shell, watching the other climbers lead bolt to bolt up the karst.
The karst mountains are the dominant feature of the landscape: broad flat valleys interrupted by natural stone towers.
The rock is rough and juggy– good thing, I need the traction and the big-muscle holds to be able to climb now two years out of practice. Even with the big holds, my forearms are pumped, my skin a little thin from feeling around for grips. I’ve been resting with knee bars in the swiss-cheese caves, admiring the little wasp nest and the shed snake skin in the crags, generally stalling on the wall to convince my fingers to keep gripping.
Luckily, Jia and I don’t have to lead climb the routes. We’ve hired our hostel’s owner (at the Climbers Inn) to guide us.
She’s renting us the gear, too. This morning, when we came down, she handed us harnesses to try on.
“I’m going on my scooter, so there’s room for one. The other person can bike– I’ll drive slow.” So I rode here on a rusty pink fixie, dodging scooters and cars, Jia twisting around to check on me every few minutes. The bike ka-chunked with every revolution, but at least there weren’t any hills.
The air is messing with me. I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole path of inhalation, nose to throat, feeling so inflamed that I stumbled out of bed to get a mask. Everybody else is fine, Jia says she doesn’t feel it, but I checked online and the air quality index is red-zone high today and tomorrow.
The valley we’re in is beautiful. Once you climb above the bamboo trees, you can see the valley, green with crops, ringed with towering white and green cliffs just like the one we’re on.
Every few minutes, someone sets off firecrackers in the valley. The noise thunders as it echoes. I was cleaning the anchor– climb to the top, tether yourself, take down the gear– when a long chain of firecrackers got set off. I had tethered off, gotten off belay, then realized my anchor was too long.
“Take!” I yelled down, the signal to hold my weight on tight belay, but Jia couldn’t hear me. So I hauled my body against the anchor chains and held on until the popping finally stopped. “…take.” She pulled me in so I could fix the gear and come down.
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