Safety is our #6 priority

Sorry it took so long to get this final day up, no doubt many of you have completely lost interest at this point. That's understandable, but hopefully I can win you back with my adventures in ignoring any pretense of safety.

Day three started with a breakfast at a restaurant/cafe called Mr. Show. It's a chain of places that offer your average selection of what China calls "Western" food. That's a loose term of course. I have yet to meet a chicken nugget or hamburger, outside of a Chinese McDonald's, that even comes close to resembling what you would get back home. Honestly, I'm fine with that. If you came to China to eat cheeseburgers, well, you're an idiot. Go home. The defining feature of the Mr. Show menu wasn't the food really, but rather the garbled English translations that could be found. About the only thing that was properly labeled was the fried fish sticks. Actually, I got the fried fish sticks, and it would probably have been more accurate to just take the word "fish" out of the name and just call them "fried sticks." Oh, and they didn't have any coffee. At 10:00 AM. At a coffee shop. China is a mysterious place.

After breakfast we took a couple taxis to our destination for the day, 小雷山, also known as Little Thunder Mountain. LTM is a scenic, if a bit touristy, spot outside of Huangshi where you can hike, swim, rent paddle boats and ride on the world's sketchiest roller coaster. More on the roller coaster in a minute. The hike up the mountain was uneventful. This wasn't what we would traditionally call hiking in the US. It wasn't trails with jagged rocks and tree roots, this was stairs, lots of stairs. But it was beautiful, and after a month of Wuhan's stellar pollution I was thoroughly enjoying some time outdoors.

Once you conquer the first part of the ascent, the fun really begins. This is where you find the roller coaster I mentioned before. 

Now, I can appreciate the views you might get from riding on this thing, but I'm not quite sure it is worth almost certain death. The best part is that the actual motions of the coaster won't kill, no it is only about 200 ft long, with three turns. Instead, the world's worst case of tetanus, courtesy of the roughly one million rusty edges that will threaten your head, neck and torso. will probably be your end. 

Moving past the death machine, we journeyed to the highest point of the mountain, the temple. But first, we had to climb about a thousand more steps. The picture below gives you an idea of how intimidating this part can be.

I chose to run up these. This lead to several minutes of contemplating the state of my mental health...

I wasn't sure that getting to the top would be worth all the effort. I was quite happy to be wrong.

You are rewarding with some pretty amazing views, and the chance to climb this beautiful tower. 

The only thing more surreal than the views was what happened at the top. Somehow my friends and I ended up sitting in a circle on the floor and singing songs from our respective countries. We're talking songs about Polish wars (according to Natalia, all Polish songs are sad and talk about war, go figure), Finnish songs, Australian drinking songs and my own offering, Burl Ives' classic "Fooba Wooba John." Can't get much more American than a nonsense folk song from 1959. Ned also sang "Big Rock Candy Mountain" about three times, because we made him do it. Mind you, we're sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by Chinese tourists who very much enjoyed watching the foreigners make complete asses of themselves.

Having heard how hard it was to get up this mountain, i.e. steps not trails, you won't be surprised to hear that there are faster ways to get to the bottom than your own two feet. Namely, zip line and slide.

The zip line was about as sketchy as they come. No high tech safety equipment here, people. Just a rusty harness held together by your own sense of indestructibility. I added to the danger by filming my trip down. I would describe my phone holding technique as a death grip. See that video here.

Upon landing, I explained to the men that I had "smashed my eggs." They thought this was very funny. Follow this link to see what happened when Bobby got stuck 20 feet from the landing pad.

 Our pursuit of near death experiences was not over, however, as we still had to take the slide down to the bottom. The common thread between these two conveyances is that they would never be allowed to exist in the United States, aside from in some redneck's homemade carnival.

 Like the zip line, this slide is probably not what you were picturing. Here are is a short list of materials that would have been safer and less painful to use than the polished marble that was employed in the construction of this slide:

1) Plastic
2) Fiber glass
3) Felt
4) Some plastic garbage bags laid end to end
5) Stadium stairs
6) A sheer drop with a thin mattress at the bottom

The slide was divided into three sections. The first section was my most painful, thanks to the turn that came right about when you reached top speed. Note the lack of banking on the sides, replaced instead with 90 degree angles. That meant you didn't so much turn as you did bang off the wall like in a pin ball machine. Most of us took the impact with our hips, but I put my arm down hoping to cushion the blow. This resulted in a pretty sweet marble burn, something I did not know existed until that moment It's currently turning into a nice pink scar.

The fatal flaw in this design was really the roof that covered it. Due to said roof, you were unable to see how long of a run-off you had before the slide ended. That was especially scary on section two, a straight drop to a flat section about 6 feet long. That gave you approximately .5 seconds to slow yourself or you would fly off the end into a set of concrete stairs. We all managed to escape that part alive, but Robyn almost took out Bobby at the knees when she came off the slide doing roughly Mach 2.  Section three was a downhill followed by a flat and another down hill. I caught about a foot of air, but managed not to have to use the landing zone at the bottom. That safety feature consisted of a mat stuffed with what must have been plastic bags and a cargo net to run into

All the zip lining and beautiful views was great, but the true highlight of this trip happened in the last five minutes. As we tried to leave, a group of Chinese people begged us to take pictures with them. This resulted in what you see below, culminating in the picture of me and my Chinese family.

That night we had dinner at a beautiful little restaurant at the bottom of the mountain, then went home and sat around in the hotel room, too tired to do anything else.

Our final half day was a great way to end. We met Bobby's family at a Sichuanese place where we ate a good deal of frog legs and chicken feet. I was also drunk on Chinese rice liquor at around 1:00 in the afternoon. This was not by choice, but necessity. When the chief of police (Bobby's dad's friend from school) asks you to drink with him, you damn well drink. Hopefully I will never have to call on him for help, but know he'll remember me if I do.

Two hours later we caught a train to Wuhan (standing ticket, of course). It's been a month since this trip and I am still processing just how crazy it really was. So far I've only figured out that I loved it.