November 2018 Part I (Liming, China)
Liming, China is an unbelievably special place.
This tiny, quiet town is located in the Yunnan Province, not so far from Myanmar. To get there, most people fly into Kunming, take an overnight train to Lijiang, and then catch a local taxi for the final 3 hour leg to Liming.
It's quite the ordeal to get there but the amazing sandstone cliffs that surround the town and the wonderful native Lisu people who populate it make the trip more than worthwhile.
Liming itself is really cute.
It has one main road along which all the restaurants and hotels and shops are located. For such a tiny population, it has a surprising amount of business-- Liming is marginally famous within China for its via ferrata routes, its beautiful views and Thousand Turtle Mountain. As a result, you end up with a strange mix of people here-- the locals, the wealthy Chinese tourists and the possibly-wealthy-possibly-dirtbag foreign climbers.
Coming to Liming, I was nervous-- what if it wasn't what I'd thought it would be?
I was travelling without a partner-- would I be able to find one there?
I had only a single rack of cams-- would others share their gear with me?
And most importantly, was I ready to climb again?
It'd only (already?) been 3 weeks since the accident, was that enough time?
Climbing.
The climbing in Liming is really amazing.
I only brought a single rack of cams up to #3 since I was travelling alone. It ended up just fine because other people had brought enough gear to share, for which I was extremely grateful.
With that said, I'd recomend a double rack of your smallest gear to #5.
If you have bigger gear, bring it! Offwidth Research Center (aka 'Don't Be a Pussy') requires Big Bros and/or a Valley Giant #9 and there's always potential for more big cracks!
When people hear about the sandstone trad in Liming, they tend to imagine splitter cracks like those found in Indian Creek, but it really isn't similar.
While there are definitely some splitter cracks around, most of the cracks are quite varied, moving from fingers to fists to offwidth and back again, so it's not common to need 5 or more of the same cam size, but it is common to carry up a #4 or #5 with you! The cracks here like to get wide mid-way!
Some kneepads might also be in order, especially if you're looking to do the Liming ultraclassic, Clamdigger (5.11b) which is pretty much 30 straight meters of knee-busting chimneying.
One wonderful exception to my comment about splitter cracks is Ding Dong's Crack (5.12a/12b) which starts wide and then has a 20 meter section of perfect #.5s.
With that said, because of how young climbing in Liming is, routes may be dirty and approaches can be a little wild. But it's really part of the adventure and the charm.
Except the fucking little spikey burrs. Fuck these things. They get all caught up in your clothes and they're a pain in the ass to pull off!
Food.
Within a few days of being in Liming, you quickly memorize which shops are where, and who sells what. The climbers tend to flock to the same three restaurants, though they try some of the others once in a while.
Overall, they settle into a routine-- morning baozi (stuffed buns, usually with pork and mushrooms) and mantou (plain buns) and douzhang (soy milk) from one shop.
Breakfast shaomien (fried noodles), shaofan (fried rice), mifan (noodle soup), jiaozi tang (dumpling soup) or zha jiaozi (fried dumplings) at another.
Dinner was the best though. Every night, we'd have huge family dinners together. Our general formula for figuring out how many dishes to order was # of people + 2. There was a large frigerator in the back which held all the meats and veggies, and we could order dishes by pointing at things or naming them directly. We ate as the ladies cooked furiously to catch up with our voracius appetites-- it was really lawless.
And after all that, dinners came down to just $2-$3 a person.
It was surprisingly easy to be vegetarian. Chinese people really know how to cook veggies deliciously, so at dinner we rarely ordered meat dishes, instead preferring to get another order of tofu skins or eggplant.
The locals, who couldn't imagine why we would not meat if we could afford it, theorized that climbers only ordered veggies because we were too poor to afford meat.
But they're adapting to climber culture. For a long time, they only made pork dumplings, but after some feedback, they started also making veggie dumplings. One day, I hope they will make veggie baozi!
Faraway.
All the climbers stay at either the Faraway Inn or the Time Inn. Heads up to anyone going to Liming, don't book rooms online! The online price is crazy wrong (like 5x the actual price!). Send the owners an email to book directly or just show up and book when you get there.
The Faraway Inn is colder because it sits in the shade of the mountains for most of the day, but it has cozy hangout spaces and is the original lodge for climbers. Laoban and Laobanyan (the owners) are sweet and take great care of everyone.
Laoban is especially rad. He really likes to make art. It's beautiful. I imagine that if he sold his art in San Francisco, each piece could easily go for over a $100 but he just makes it for fun, decorating the inn with his strange creations. On his off-days, you can see him shouldering a traditional straw pack to go wandering in the woods so he can collect more wood and metalscraps.
Laoban also has a massive rock collection. You think climbers love rocks, but I've never seen any climber with a rock collection like this! Out of everyone in Liming, Laoban loves rocks the most. One day, someone tripped over his rocks, and Laobanyan (his wife) told him to clean up his pile-- he was forced to toss out nearly fourth of them into the river! He spent all day trying to decide which rocks to let go. Like actually an entire day.
The greatest surprise about the housing in Liming is that all the beds have heated mattresses. It is the most wonderful thing in the world especially in November when it drops to freezing at night. The beta is to turn on the heater before you go for dinner.
Because the greatest feeling in the world is climbing into a heated bed. It's amazing.
Every night after dinner, we'd sit in the living room and chat for a while, but once it got too cold we'd retreat to our beds and just sleep in heavenly warm bliss.
But remember to turn off the heater before you fall asleep because otherwise you wake up in the middle night super sweaty and that's gross.
Neighborhood dogs.
I love the dogs in Liming.
The way they own dogs here is very different than in Western culture. Though the dogs may be 'owned' by someone, the dogs have free reign of theirselves. They will sleep and eat their main meals at home, but besides that, they just run around the streets and play all day.
These dogs are all friends! Some days, a few of them will play together, but on this day, they formed a scruffy band and ran up and down the main street together!
Ding Dong is the unofficial mascot of Liming climbing. He's owned by Laoban. Despite his stout size, he actually is a superstar at scampering up the steep approaches and he loves hiking up with climbers!
You can also often find him scavenging for scraps from the local restaurants, that fatty.
Zombie Dog (I don't know his actual name) is also very friendly. He lives a little bit outside of town, but he loves to tag along on approaches! Despite only having one eye, he is super fucking fast at approaches.
He looks like he´s seen quite a lot of shit in his fierce doggy days but he´s a total sweetheart!
Market day.
Market day is on every 5th, 15th and 25th of the month.
It's quite the affair! People come into Liming from the local area for market day.
We load up on fruits, cakes and snacks and peruse the selection of electronics, toys and clothes.
And the locals? The locals load up on gray jellies, chickens and pig parts, seasonings and noodles, and of course they make sure to stop by one of the two dentists who set up shop during market day.
It's always a fun time.
Rest days.
Most of us took our rest days pretty seriously which meant lazing in the sun, stretching, reading books, taking naps and snacking all day.
Most of us but not the Germans.
German rest days included hiking fifteen kilometers through the woods and then climbing the next four days on.
Oh Germans.
But there was really beautiful hiking out in Liming.
Many Chinese tourists came specifically hike up Thousand Turtle Mountain, so named because the sandstone rock at the top looks like thousands of turtle backs.
It's pretty cool actually and well worth the hike up.
Another great rest day activity is eating ice cream, because ice cream in Liming only costs about 25 cents.
Hell, it's a great every day activity.
Climbers.
The best seasons for Liming are spring (March - May) and fall (mid-October to November). You can climb through winter as well if you don't mind being cold.
At any given time during those months, there are about 15-25 climbers in Liming and most everyone gets to know each other pretty quickly.
It's a really amazing community.
In the morning we have breakfast together and make plans to climb. People pair up and head out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. For crags further away, we band together to organize car rides from Laoban.
In the evening, we all have dinner together and catch up on our days.
It was especially interesting-- because of the location of Liming, so remote and adventurous compared to many other climbing destinations, and because of the climbing style, primarily trad cracks, the average age skewed older here.
At 29, I was one of the youngest climbers in town, the majority of people being in their 30s! For a while, I was the only American and one of just three Asians, surrounded by blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans in the middle-of-nowhere-China.
I really couldn't have asked for anything more perfect than Liming.
The climbing, as mentioned, was phenomenal.
But what really hit me the most was the people around me.
I was so lucky to have fallen in with some really wonderful people.
Getting out of my warm, heated bed to face the freezing cold Liming mountain air should have been an awful task every morning, but it never was.
In the courtyard of the Faraway Inn, I knew there were good people hanging out, drinking tea and chitchatting, waiting to go for breakfast.
Somehow we had built a perfect little paradise here in rural China. It was a community I completely trusted, one that I looked forward to being a part of every day.
The best climbing in the world couldn't have made me love climbing again.
But these people did.
