Why Water Costs More on Top of Huangshan — Epoche B1
Huangshan, Thursday Dear Anna, I came up the eastern steps yesterday — three hours of stone stairs — and was overtaken near the top by a man of about fifty carrying two crates of bottled water and a sack of cabbages on a shoulder pole. He was not hurrying. He had a rhythm: forty or fifty steps, then the pole swung to the other shoulder without stopping, a short rest at the landings, on again. He is the answer to a question I had not thought to ask, which is how there can be hotels on the top of this mountain at all. The cable cars carry people, but the summit hotels stand a long walk beyond the stations, along ridge paths that are steps and only steps — no road reaches them. So most of what the mountain-top uses goes up the way it has always gone up: on porters' shoulder poles. Vegetables, rice, drinks, clean bed sheets, loads of forty kilos and more, paid by the weight carried. And the traffic runs both ways — the next porter I passed was going down, with two bins of the summit's rubbish. Once you have watched the porters for an afternoon, the prices up here stop being outrageous and become simple arithmetic. A bottle of water that costs two yuan in the town at the base costs several times that at the top, and the difference is not greed. It is the steps. You are not paying for the water; you are paying for its journey. I drank my expensive bottle on Bright Summit and have not complained about my backpack since. Sunrise tomorrow, if the cloud allows. Wish me luck. Mei References Tong, J. (2009). The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture. Cambridge University Press.