China Part II: Mount Huang

A thousand peaks, one spectacular view
Has me upturned and refreshed anew
How can you say the world's not worth seeing
When you haven't experienced that lightness of being?

If you haven't gone on a long road trip or train ride (I'm talking few stops, no overnight stays) then you haven't travelled enough, and you NEED to. It's much like a right of passage, credibility to your travel complaints. And road trips are one thing: my family and I used to drive down to Florida (all 28 hours) every few years for vacation. But even that longer trip had nothing on the giant 19 hour train ride we took from Beijing to Huang Shan (oh and believe me, more on trains later in future posts). Amazing ride, got to see much of the country side along the east side of China. It was really cool as the scenery changed from wheat fields slowly into tiered rice paddies, complete with oxen at 4:30 am.


I think for me, seeing the country side and seeing how ordinary poor farmers lives are, have been some of the most important aspects of my escapade through China. I think that the image of the China that we get from the media, the political one, is one that deliberately ingnores ordinary Chinese life for ordinary Chinese people, who are often overlooked by people in power or people in western society. Anyways...more about that later...commentary once the overview is done...

So anyways, we arrived at Huang Shan town the day after we got on the train, and started our trek up the mountain two hours later, once we had reached the base of the mountain range. We took the tour with a Chinese tour group...which was an interesting experience in itself, me being the only one in the whole group who can't speak Mandarin, and constantly turning to bug John to translate for me. Kudos to him, though, because he totally obliged.

Anyways, most of the 30-odd people in the group decided to take the cable car up the 1600m to the first level of the mountain, John and I and two other couples decided to walk up. Best decision of our lives. Taking the cable car would have been (A) a cop out, and (B) a shame, because we would have missed all of the scenery going up.


So we took the western route up the mountain, quickly leaving behind the other couples (go Hart House!). When we had gotten halfway up, we got to a fork where we had to decide whether to take the super crazy right pathway (adding on an additional 4km of climbing) or the tamer left pathway. We took the super crazy one.

It was the most excruiciating climb of my life. John and I stopped talking. Not out of anger or whatever, just because we were too tired to talk. Some sections were so steep that we had to climb up on all fours; the steepest section of the route we took featured an incline of 89 degrees. That's right. Those aren't stairs you're climbing at that point, it's a ladder cut into stone.


But my goodness, the view from the top (about 1800m a.s.l.) was incredible, made that much better because we knew how rough the climb had been to get to the top. The scenery was spectacular. I unfortunately have started to forget what it looked like (but good thing I have pictures!), but what I do remember is the feeling I had when I first looked out from that peak out to the scenery and seas and seas of craggy mountain peaks. I was breathless and euphoric and excited. It was so beautiful I may have cried a little. But don't tell anyone.


Anyways, we had to make it back to meet our tour group, which involved another 2.5km of hiking to another nearby peak. First we set off across a Fishback, a natural rock bridge connecting the two peaks, a 10 m long affair with straight drops down to death on either side. Quite scary especially since Chinese attractions aren't totally concerned with safety, the only barriers between me and the drop of doom being a wonkly looking chain on either side. Let's put it this way -- if John wanted to off me on the trip, he would have had many many chances.


After the Fishback was a long climb down the peak and another long climb up to the peak where we met up with our group.

We finally met up with our group, tired, dehydrated, covered with a large layer of dust (China is so damn dusty!), stuck nicely to the skin by a gluey layer of sweat, but entirely happy. It had been about 4 hours since we started our climb, and we still had a lot to go. The best thing about this place was that there are tonnes of peaks to visit, and tonnes of ancient trees and rock formations to look at. One of my favourites was the turtle rock formation, in the picture below. At least that's what the tour guide says. We and some other people think it looks a little like something else, and you can probably try and guess what that is, but I guess it's for you to decide and definitely not something I want to outright put on my blog :)


For the next three hours we continued to climb, visiting the highest peak and overall seeing some amazing scenery. This is definitely the prettiest mountain range/area that I've ever been to. Beats the Rockies, the Appalachians, and Hawaiian volcanoes hands down. Supremely breathtaking, and unfortunately, the pictures don't do it justice (of course...otherwise why go there?).

By around 5pm we headed to our hotel on the top of the mountain, had dinner with two other couples, including a Japanese couple we got to know (they were so great) and went to bed by 8pm.

We had to get up at 3:45 am in order to hike up to the sunrise area. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the sunrise because it was too cloudy, which was a disappoinment (it's supposed to be beautiful...and so I'd like to go back another time), but we did have fun getting around the crowd of sunrise seekers and climbing a fence to get a better view of the non-sunrise.


After that was another 7 hours of hiking, seeing the best scenic spot in the entire park, and lots of funny looking natural rocks, and, unfortunately, the descent down the eastern route.

Fei Lai Shi -- "The Rock that Flew Here": a 12 m high rock that looks like it's about to topple over:



My favourite view...when you're actually there all you can see right out to the horizon are peaks, and they seem to extend on forever. They're just gorgeously beautiful:


A few more random shots on the mountain:


When we got back down the mountain, we got on the bus and visited a tea shop (thus beginning my obsession with tea and the reaffirmation of my love of the wonderful drink) where we sat and drank tea and I bought a lot of tea, some of it grown on the mountain we had climbed. Next was a trip to a nearby zoo where both John and I drank snake venom (mixed in with alcohol to save our lives, apparently, and prevent us from dying of poisoning) and saw a bunch of strange looking chinese animals).

All in all eventful, and all in all amazing. We were back in Huang Shan town in the evening in time to board our next train to Xiamen.

I will never forget this mountain though, because I have never before seen anything so spectacular, and will be hard pressed to see anything more breathtaking.

Actually a really cool thing about the mountain that I forgot to mention was that everything (including food, garbage, bedsheets, etc) needs to be carried up the mountain on foot because, well, it's China, and the cable cars are reserved for people. So locals from around the area have the back breaking job of carrying everything up the mountain every day to suit tourists' needs. There are tonnes of these people, each carrying around 2oo kg of stuff on bamboo poles (no exaggeration). It's amazing to see these old people carrying so much, singing as they rested on their ascent.