Changbai Mountain, Jilin Province, China
I didn’t notice all the upturned heads until I settled into my seat. As the bus doors closed, I glanced up and saw the eyes of everyone around me flicking nervously toward Heaven. Like any good primate, mine did too.
Yellow jackets. Dozens of them smacked against the ceiling above. And the windows around. My eyes flicked back down to the faces of the people whose eyes were flicking. Their eyes flicked up and around and mine followed. No one said anything. My world quickly shrank to silent flicking eyes and the little electric pop of wings and carapaces bouncing against the walls. Everyone so often, someone would slap at their hair in a cautious panic.
At last, the engine fired to life, and I was glad I at least couldn’t hear the bugs anymore, even if I still see all the crawling, jerking eyes.
But the bus growled onto the road, and slowly the insects disappeared, maybe into the air conditioner. Nobody seemed to care at all where they had gone.
It takes two bus trips to get to the western slope of Changbai Mountain in China’s Jilin Province, the volcanic peak jutting up out of the dense forests that surround Songjianghe Village – or these days, Songjianghe construction site: “Where everything is half finished and the restaurants never open!” The first bus, the one with the wasps, chugs past the half built resorts of the future as it pulls out of a faux Alpish ski village that developers must hope will one day transform into a real one. It rolls past toll booths, peeling police stations, and dilapidated villages, as it follows the muddy Songjiang River, swollen with the summer rains and the last of the snow melt from Heaven Lake in the crater at the top of Changbai. The water feeds the lush grasses and fir trees that give way to painted meadows just after the transfer to the second bus. This second one is the more harrowing of the two, even without the bugs, as camel caravans of the green-sided beasts sprint their way above the trees and charge past each other on the curves of the twisted road that leads them to the top.
From there, its 1,400 steps dodging selfie takers and breathless Korean tour groups to get the rim of China’s largest, deepest, and highest crater lake – a multi-hued blue broth in a bowl of lichen and stone outcroppings at 2,744 meters in elevation. I ran those steps, and it was good that I did. I got about five minutes of mostly unobstructed view of the basin, half of which belongs to North Korea, before the wind smothered the view in clouds.
Heaven Lake
I’d be warned about the finicky nature of both the weather on Changbai, which means eternal white, as well Heaven Lake’s very own prehistoric lake monster.
I saw the weather but not the lake monster. I’ll blame the weather for that one.
Sojourns 