climbing huang shan day 1

my first post on this sucked, so i re-wrote it

last week i went to huang shan, one of china's most famous mountains. to put things in perspective, about 15 million people visited the mountain in 2007 alone (says wikipedia). i visited the mountain during the national day week when everyone in china has a week-long holiday. many people do not even bother traveling at this time because it's too crazy. while there were definitely a lot of people there, it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be and it was interesting having to share the mountain with so many other people.

although i had planned on climbing huang shan by myself in 1 day, i ended up meeting 2 chinese guys (jayee and gavin) in my hostel and decided to climb it with them in 2 days. this was a really good decision for 2 reasons- 1. because now i have 2 really good new friends that i will always remember climbing huang shan with and 2. i feel like this is not a mountain that you should do in 1 day. it's pretty tall and you would miss the sunrise, which i think is one of the main highlights of the trip. here we are at the beginning of the hike.
we got a super early start on the day the bus left from our hostel to go to the mountain, the sun wasn't even up yet. we packed our way onto the bus and i was sitting there about to fall asleep when i realized that the hostel had not given me my lunch at breakfast (you could buy packaged lunches from the hostel for the next day). i asked jayee and gavin what i should do, and they said i should go back and get it. it seemed like the bus was about to leave but i was like ok whatever and ran off the bus to get it.

when i got back to the hostel, there was a lot of confusion because there was no record of me having ordered a lunch for that day and i was telling them that i had already paid for it. they went ahead and made my sandwich anyhow. it turns out the error was made when i had cancelled the lunch from the previous day (because i had a headache and couldn't go) and moved it to this day, but they didn't realize that until later, so at least they went on the assumption that i was telling the truth about paying.

after my lunch was finally ready, i ran back outside as fast as i could to get back to the bus. as i came around a corner, i saw someone standing there looking down the street. i assumed he was the bus driver. he looked pretty angry and yelled at me to hurry up. while the hostel people were making my sandwich they were calling the buses to tell them not to leave me. this is why i said this hostel was so freakin organized. then i saw jayee standing there holding all of my bags. i was like oh my god, did the bus leave with gavin?...but thankfully it turned out there was a smaller bus still there which we could take. i'm pretty sure everyone hated me when i got on and the bus driver told me to apologize. the bus driver lightened up to me after we got on though, which was good because i was sitting up in the very front seat with him. i was so lucky i got the front seat- i had an awesome view of all the little villages and scenery on the way to the moutanin. i was so tired but i knew i would regret falling asleep and missing it so i just put my ipod on and tried to relax and take it in. so that was an interesting start to the trip!

we climbed so many steps that day. i definitely have never climbed that many steps in my life. i had made a foreign friend at the hostel 2 days earlier and she told me that huang shan was freezing, so i was wearing leggings under my jeans and a long sleeve shirt with a hoodie and a jacket. after we started climbing for like 15 minutes, i was already hot. i realized that we had used different methods to get up this portion of the mountain- while we were doing the 3 hour hike (all staiiiirsss!) she had waited in line to take the cable car. no wonder she was cold! i had no desire to wait in that line (it was like an hour..), and i also wanted to say that i climbed the whole thing myself so i'm happy we didn't do that. i eventually found a bathroom to take my layers off. the hike was pretty hard but there were plenty of rest stops along the way and jayee, gavin and i had time to get to know each other better. most of this portion of the hike looked like this:
it was really beautiful. i hadn't seen that many pictures of huang shan before but i thought alright, if this is what this place looks like, that's great! however, someone coming down the stairs told us that this scenery was just normal, and that it was even more beautiful at the top.

after getting through that first portion of the hike, we finally passed the place where the cable car would have taken us and came to this bridge which had all these locks fastened to it. the locks are put there by couples to ensure their everlasting love, haha. the chinese are so romantic.

then we started coming to some really impressive sights. the sign was right, i started to believe how majestic huang shan really was :)-

here are some of the first views we got from the top of the mountain that day. my crappy camera really couldn't handle these pictures. it was a little foggy that day, but the feeling i get from the pictures is not the same feeling i had when i was there. it felt much brighter and fresh. i felt a little scared when i was up there because it was sooo high, there were a lot of people, and the hand rails seemed very low and unstable. notice me gripping that rail, and the guy on the right side barging in!



afterwards, we checked into our dorm for the night, grabbed a quick bite to eat and set off quickly because dusk was coming and we still had places to go. the route we chose was a deep canyon. at first when we started descending, it felt really good to be going down rather than up, but i realized that we were going to have to climb all of those steps to get back up...ah! i think this was one of the hardest portions of the hike because it was incredibly steep and we were really tired after climbing all day. but it was so beautiful and serene, it didn't matter.




we saw a father carrying his little girl down into a canyon too. i don't know how he did it, and why he didn't have some kind of thing to strap her on his back. it seemed to be a pride thing, but to me it was also very dangerous. i guess one day, she can tell people that that's how she first climbed huang shan.


at last, the sun started to set, and it felt like the world was going to sleep.

it was time to start going back up before it got too dark. along the way, i made a new little friend. with little to no encouragement he took wonderful pictures for me and told me all the english he knew (his ABCs, his numbers, a few colors!). he was only 4 years old, so i think his english will be very good one day :) his mom must have bought him that medal at the top of the mountain.



we returned to the hotel and ate a big dinner to refuel our bodies. afterwards, there wasn't anything to do in the dorm room, i was exhausted, and we were getting up at like 4 to see the sun rise the next morning so i started falling asleep around 7 or 8. the dorm room felt really cramped- there were like 2 other families in there. they were all very kind though. one woman had her little son with her in the same bed, and she kept telling him softly to be quiet because i was sleeping. how nice, haha. finally, the lights went out and i went to la la land. what a great first day of the trip...