huangshan

Last weekend I went to the Huangshan Mountains, aka the Yellow Mountains. Part of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was filmed there. I was walking home one day and I passed a travel agency. I decided to go in there and try to set up a trip to the Yellow Mountains, we had been talking about it for a few days. Seemed like luck that I passed by. I walked in and they spoke no English. I did it in Chinese the best I could and figured that things were okay, I thought I had a bus ride, hotel, park passes, and tour guide arranged. Upon getting to the park I found that I had that arranged, and much more, my friends and I (3 people including me) were part of a Chinese tour group. The red hats, and the orange hats that line up endlessly at Tienanmen Square to see Mao, that was us. I got a red hat. We followed a guy with a loudspeaker. We were the only non-Chinese in the group, which thankfully was not huge. I thought the trip was verging on disaster and my friends were a little angry at what I had gotten them into. Their Chinese, hard to believe, is worse than mine so I was the go to guy. My friends and I wanted to hike up the mountain, they wanted to take a cable car. I realized that we would never find our hotel on our own, the mountain was huge, so after much confused arguing in English and Chinese, I persuaded my friends to go with the Chinese group. That was a low point. After we got up there, the scenery was incredible, although the crowds were huge. It is the China that you see in movies. We walked on the ridge line all afternoon and got to our mountaintop hotel just as the sky opened up in a huge rainstorm. Our guide warned us constantly that it was about to rain. We were fairly angry in general, so we did not buy a raincoat as an act of defiance. Thankfully we were not rained on. The rain cleared away after dinner and we saw one of the most incredible sunsets I have ever seen. The mountains are in the clouds. We stayed in a dorm room with about 5 other Chinese guys. I went to bed about 10pm, totally exhausted, but did not sleep much, because one of the Chinese guys had the most severe snoring I have ever heard. It sounded like animals were fighting in his throat. He probably will not live for very long, either because of whatever is causing that horrible noise, or someone will kill him out of annoyance.

We were awoken at 330am, time to see the sunset. We walked in the dark on slick stone sidewalks. Sometimes on the edge of hills, no rails, and steep drops. We walked to a hilltop, mountaintop? I don't know. I was almost completely disoriented. Some of our group were hiking in pajamas, two people, a mother and daughter. We called them the "pajama people." The pajama people were the slowest. My dutch friend has a light, and the guide asked us to walk at the back of the group, to sort of add some definition to where our group was in the darkness. The pajama people, however, kept slipping even further behind. Around 4:30, after hiking for an hour in total darkness, other than my dutch friend's light, we lost the pajama people. I asked the dutch guy if we should go back for them. He was even less sympathetic to the Chinese group experience than I was, and his response was "absolutely not," and he kept going. So we didn't see the pajama people for about 5 hours, and somehow they turned up at the bottom with us. I have no idea how that happened. We arrived at a hilltop to watch the sunset, but the fog or the clouds were too thick, we didn't see it. It was time to hike 8km down the mountain, all stairs. We were going down pretty well when we happened upon a possibly intoxicated, rather fat Chinese man. He kept daring us to climb an impossibly steep series of stairs up to a mountaintop. Of course we all tried to do it. The five of us (my group plus two Chinese from the large Chinese group - the five of us wanted to hike down together while the rest took the cable car down), sprinted up, holding onto a rope at the side of the stairs. About halfway up we realized that it was a stupid idea, and the Chinese man had left already so he would not witness our humiliation. I am slightly ashamed, but not really ashamed, to admit that we stopped, and the dutch guy kept going. So I sat on a very steep Chinese staircase on the side of a mountain for an uncomfortably long period of time, but the views were nice. The views were very nice. The scenery in the Huangshan is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. The walk down 8 km of stairs completely exhausted us, and suggested that a walk up 8km of stairs the previous day might not have been possible. It seems in the end, that by going with the Chinese group, I might have stumbled into the right thing.