She looks like my grandmother. That’s the first thought I have.
The two of us, Trippin Travellers, are on our way up
Mt. Emei Shan in Sichuan, China.
The hike is grueling. Snow crunching under our boots.
The freezing wind. Ice. You could barely feel your fingers anymore.
We stop for a snack break at this little shop run by an old lady who had a nice,
wide smile on her face. There is not much we could say.
But a lot we could communicate.
A smile is always the best language to use while traveling
and this old woman certainly knew how to small. But you don’t realize that.
All you know is that you were freezing
and you no longer are as you take refuge in her small shop.
Many hours go by. A night of more freezing near the summit.
We make our way back,
having to be even more careful as our boots slide
on the slippery ice on the way down.
One slip and we were looking at a beautiful, instantaneous death.
The climb down takes the whole day.
My feet are screaming. I can no longer feel my toes.
Just one step after another, I think. I am hungry, tired,
and all I wanted was to surrender to sweet slumber.
The lights of a monastery twinkle below. Refuge.
But like everything else on a mountain, nothing is what it seems.
An hour passes. Two more and we are still nowhere close to the monastery.
And suddenly, the darkness was upon us.
We are in the middle of a snowy mountain
with just silence for company, surrounded by inky blackness.
Panic sets in. Have you ever seen darkness? We do. That time.
We use the thin light of a torch, step by step,
cursing our feet that slide out every now and then under the thin ice.
We have no mobile connectivity.
Thoughts of staying on the mountain begin to flash in front of us.
We have no sleeping bags. No food. Barely any water left.
You start to think. Would you survive? No one even knows we are up here.
No one would come looking for us. Another hour in the darkness.
And just then we see it. The snack shop. It’s closed.
But relief washes over me in waves. We run to the door.
Would there be someone still inside? And there is!
The old lady opens the door.
She somehow understands that we have no place to stay.
Miming is pretty easy in this case. And then, she leads us down a path.
A path we could never have found to a building tucked away from view.
Were rooms available? Yes. For 150 RMB a night.
There was no question of bargaining.
I sink into the bed, the heated blanket sending warmth through my body.
I think of the old lady. Her kindness. We thank her. And I think tomorrow,
I will go and thank her properly. I sleep. But I would never see her again.
We try to make our way back to the shop in the morning. But we are lost.
I give up in frustration. every once in a while even today,
I remember her face, four years since.
My grandmother is watching over me through the kindness of strangers.
