Flaming Mountains and Monkey Kings

Today I saw a completely unrelated article which mentioned Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West. In this classic novel of Chinese literature, the Flaming Mountains of Turpan are mentioned... just remembering a visit to the famous mountains I felt inspired to kill some of your precious time.

The Flaming Mountains is one of the hottest places in the world, and the hottest place in China. Not a single blade of grass grows on the hills of Flaming Mountain and there are no traces of birds or animals there. When the July sun heats the bare rocks, the blazing air current rolls up like burning flames. In the summer, the region gets so hot that you can "hard boil" an egg by burying it in the sand for just a few minutes. With strong direct radiation from the sun, the temperatures can reach 49 degrees Celsius and the earth's surface temperature can top 70 degrees. From a distance, at the foot of the mountain, dozens of the red rock hills look like flaming fireballs under the blazing sun - hence its name, Flaming Mountain.

So during the nomadfest we figured we'd check it out, right? Wrong! I've seen a good amount of places in China and I'm already used to extreme commercialization of anything that has touristic value. Quite frankly the whole super-tourism is a very big put off, but this was probably the last straw.

Basically you approach the mountain, you can see it, but you can't touch it. The whole mountain is walled off with a fence. There is an entrance which you can enter in (for a ridiculous admission fee of course) and that gets you into an artificial chamber which holds some stupid statues and giant toys (no I'm not kidding), a couple sickly looking camels that dumb looking tourists can hop on and get a photo taken (for another ridiculous fee) and take a glimpse at a giant thermometer that rises out of the desert like what the French call a certain... I don't know what.

It was seriously the final straw I've had of mainland tourism. Standing over the entrance to this tourist trap was a statue of Sun Wukong, so unfortunately he gets to become the symbol of my displeasure with mainland tourism. From now on each time I see a picture of him or hear his name, I'm just going to think of Flaming Mountains and get pissed off. Basically the entire group was so pissed off that we took a group photo under the Monkey King with our middle fingers extended, decided that the Bezeklik Caves would be another tourist trap and headed back to Turpan to chill out under the shadow of the grape leaves. I'd probably be better off visiting a museum in London or Berlin anyway as the caves were badly pillaged and most relics stolen by Europeans.


Seriously, if you are ever in Turpan and consider visiting the Flaming Mountains, don't. If you can make it there without the wind knocking over your car on the way, you are best off snapping a photo from your car, and then turning around and driving back. Don't even bother to get out.

I don't know why it would just not be possible to go up and hike the mountain like any other mountain (it's not that high). I'm so sick and tired of mainland tourism that I'm tempted to start a blog about it, invite anyone else who feels the same way to join me as editors, and hope it will get noticed by the authorities resulting in something positive being done about it. On the other hand it will probably only get banned here. Seeing that I had my house raided by the po-po last night at 11pm makes me wonder if that's a good idea after all. So since I'm not willing to risk my working permit on the improvement of tourism here, the Monkey King gets to be the slapping boy.

Thanks a lot Monkey King, you ruined Christmas! You're on my blacklist together with Ronald McDonald (I hate that clown!).