Continued from Huangshan Day 2 Part 1.
Soooo many steps. I won’t complain about the steps in subway stations anymore.
One of the rare short flatter parts.
Ahhh, an awesome overlook of…whiteness.
Eeeeee!!!
All over the mountain, they’ve got these concrete trash areas built into the rocks. They’ve actually done a superb job keeping the mountain clean. There is essentially no trash anywhere on the mountain.
Remember the no trash on the mountain that I mentioned earlier? Well, this is one of the few exceptions.
They sell these walking sticks at the shops around here. Here’s a broken one in the trash. But…they are pretty useless anyway because they are made way too short for most of the people here. Speaking of height, populations in different regions of China have a pretty good variation in height. They are much shorter in the South, where RL is sometimes a whole head taller some of the girls, girls in platform heels. Then in Beijing, most of the people are taller and there are certainly girls who are over 6 feet tall.
You can buy a lock with your name and your lover’s name on it, then you can lock it on the mountain. We did not buy in to this.
Again, epic. It feels like it’s from another world.
The directional signs suck on top of the mountain, and many of the paths are not marked. GPS on my phone to help find the way.
Seriously awesome.
There are several hotels built on top of the mountain, and this is the first one we come across.
They even have a basketball court here. Basketball is a pretty popular sport here in China.
This is how all the hotels and shops get resupply, human power.
If you are lazy, you can also hire two guys to carry you around on a chair. I think it was around 150 yuan for 2.5km, or something like that. Not too bad of a deal actually considering how many stairs there are.
A quick visit to the convenience store to see what they have. We’ve already been warned that everything on top of the mountain has the prices marked up.
We didn’t buy anything here, but we did see vacuum wrapped pig’s feet.
That’s a tough job. Going up and down thousands of steps everyday with a heavy load on your back.
They also have small water reservoirs all around the mountain top. To fight fire?
We’ve been walking all these stairs, and we have yet to reach our hotel. This is the reason why we had to downsize our packs to just our day packs.
That’s a bulky load.
Finally reached our hotel! This is the view right in front of it.
The hotels up on the mountain are expensive for China. Not only are they expensive, most of them have seen better days.
I decided that if I was going to pay a lot for hotel room anyway, I might as well pay a little bit more for one that’s actually nice. This is the new wing of the Xihai hotel, and it is indeed very nice.
This is what $148 a night gets you in the nicest hotel on top of Huangshan.
For the price, it also comes with a frosted glass to the bedroom from the shower.
Adult entertainment not included in the price of the room.
We felt like we hadn’t earned our nice hotel yet, since we’ve only been hiking around for an hour and a half. Time to head out again and walk some more stairs.
We found a trail that had no one on it but us. Loving the fact that the mountain is not crowded. We’ve heard horror stories about the massive crowds of tour groups that come visit Huangshan. Not today though!
Seriously, I bet we climbed a few thousand steps today already.
The higher we get, the foggier it gets.
What a view! Whiteness. We were a little disappointed that the cloud is so thick. Well, at least it’s not raining, and at least the weather is very nice and cool. We are very much enjoying our hike out here. Very peaceful and serene.
Whiteness!
So foggy.
KL points.
Take that water!
So weird to see so many fire hydrants on top of this mountain. I guess this mountain IS a national treasure, so it would suck if a lightening created a fire and burned all the trees down.
Stop staring at my butt.
Hah. I pulled on this branch, and when I shook it, I managed to shake a bug into RL’s eye. Hahaha….she’s fine.
We are expecting!!! And it’s me who is pregnant!!!
O. M. G. The never ending stairs.
KL points the way.
Fed up with the elevation changes.
Our view of another cable car station. This one is for the North side of the mountain.
Good! One less place for me to climb to.
We guess this is the dorm for some of the people who work up here.
What the mountain looks like without heavy clouds.
Literally as we are coming off the last steps back to our hotel, I put my foot into an uneven part of the path and rolled my ankle. FUCK ME!!!!! Photo taken before it started swelling up more.
Nurse me back to health, nurse wife. They wanted $5 USD for a bucket of ice, so we said screw it and settled for cold water on a towel from the sink….Sigh…I feel so dumb rolling my ankle. Shit.
Better than ice! Cold beer!!
They don’t know how to make a rum and coke here in China. Everywhere, we’ve gotten a shot of rum, and a can of coke.
Nurse me back to health, nurse beer!
Well, I guess we are done for the day. Injured myself and the fog gets much thicker outside.
Early dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. We expect this to be an expensive mediocre meal.
At least we get tea for free.
Yup, a pricey mediocre meal. But hey, got the job done.
We went back to our room after dinner, but then came back down to the convenience store inside the hotel to get more water. When we came down, we noticed that the cloud had completely disappeared and the moon was out.
I took this long exposure shot of the sky. Not a single cloud in the sky and lots of visible stars due to the remoteness of the mountain. Cool.(There was a flood light outside of the hotel that shows on half of the photo, hence the variation in color)
The internet in our hotel isn’t very good, so we killed some time playing Angry Birds. RL’s first time playing Angry Birds…and it shows.
My ankle hurts, but it doesn’t seem to be terrible. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow morning. I suspect that it’ll be stiff, but still walkable…crosses fingers.
To be continued at Huangshan Day 3.