Huangshan, the Yellow Mountains

The day after the great cake battle, Tim and I began our travels.  After a lovely, relaxing day of hastily marking 200 exam papers and calculating all 500 of my students’ semester averages through extensive data imputing, we left on a sleeper train to Hangzhou.  Sleeper trains are fun.

We were just using Hangzhou as a transfer city to get to Huangshan, but as Tim hadn’t seen Xi Hu (the West Lake) I put aside my hatred for the city that once caused me unbearable stress and we did a little exploring.

Here I am by a shop selling bouquets of small bears, rabbits and lambs.

Perhaps Hangzhou isn’t so bad after all.

We went out on the lake.  Tim tends to ruin photos so I tried to take some of him where most of his face was cut out.

In the afternoon we caught a bus to Huangshan city, Tunxi, where Stephen, the owner of our hostel, picked us up from the bus station in person.  I’d read some really good reviews of Stephen’s hostel online and he was unbelievably helpful.  He advised us on how to get to the mountain and which route to take, and even organised a visit to an ancient village with his taxi driver mate.

The hostel was on ‘Ancient Street’, the most scenic part of town and quite pleasant, although we did get lost trying to find the supermarket, and 2 dogs chased me down the street after I took this photo.

On Sunday morning we left early with Taxi Driver Mate, who first took us to 'Breakfast Street'.

Next stop was the ancient village, which I cannot name, but was very picturesque, in a dilapidated sort of way.  It was like being transported back to a very long time ago.

Weirdly, people still lived there.  And I thought Pingxiang was rural.

Taxi Driver Mate then drove us to Tangkou, the village at the foot of the mountains, where we got a bus up to the entrance.

Huangshan (or ‘Yellow Mountain’) is one of China’s 5 holy peaks and conquering the mountain is something that most Chinese wish to experience at least once in their lifetime.  As with everything in China, climbing a mountain is not quite the same as hiking in the West.  The mountain sides are too steep to traverse, so they just build concrete steps all the way up.

Walking up steps may sound an easy way to climb a mountain but it was actually fairly exhausting.  It took around 3 hours to get to the top, and I was tired after the first 10 minutes.  My shame was only increased by the fact that we were joined on the path (and occasionally overtaken) by dozens of porters carrying everything necessary for civilisation up and down the mountain.  They carried food, laundry, building material and even full sized gas cylinders.   

Here’s someone with some massive bamboo poles.

It was quite painful to watch them struggle up with their loads, especially since there was a cable car right overhead that could have done the same work in a fraction of the time and with far fewer injuries sustained.

Nevertheless, the scenery was beautiful.

China even manages to keep its mountains clean by putting bins every 100m or so.  Why hold onto your rubbish when you could provide another porter with a job instead?

Once at the top, we walked to the first main scenic spot, which promised us something fantastic.

The Chinese do love to exaggerate.  Most of the ‘scenic spots’ looked exactly the same.

There were lots of interestingly contorted pine trees (one of the ‘Wonders of Huangshan') that were helpfully described on little plaques with elaborate imagery.  I think this one was a dragon diving into water.

Thanks to back-breaking labour and China’s incessant need to build, there are 4 hotels on Huangshan.  We stayed at the Paiyunlou.

I dread to think how many porters it took to construct it.

After almost seeing the sunset, we decided to get up early for the sunrise the next morning.

Here it is, as viewed from Lion’s Peak.

And here’s ‘Monkey Watching the Sea of Clouds’.

After breakfast, we circuited the peaks, which involved a lot more steps.  At ‘Bright Summit’, one of the highest peaks, a helpful Chinese man offered to take a photo of us.

His friends then took a photo with us, because if there’s one thing more thrilling than climbing a holy mountain on a beautiful sunny day, it’s getting your photo taken with a couple of foreigners at the top.

Descending the mountain was quite a bit easier than ascending, though I’m pretty sure we were being stalked by a few Chinese women.

Overall, it felt good to conquer one of China’s finest mountains.  We took a minibus back to Tunxi to stay at Stephen’s hostel --> again.  The next day he very kindly helped us get a bus back to Hangzhou for the next stage of our travels, but was clearly doing a favour for Bus Driver Mate and managed to put us on a bus which spent an hour circulating the city picking up random locals, and only left when I texted Stephen, a tad concerned, and he called the driver to check.

We got back to Hangzhou, eventually, where we were conveniently chucked off the bus on a main road near-ish the coach station.  I think China just likes us to feel challenged.   

After some scary ‘conversation’ with a whole group of taxi drivers all yelling at me in Chinese, I managed to secure us a ride to the airport shuttle bus, and then we were on our way to Xi’an…