Jen's mom and dad decided to join us on this part of the trip through Asia. For our first stop with them, we decided to go to Huangshan (aka Yellow Mountain), also now known as the inspiration for the world of Pandora in James Cameron's movie "Avatar". The biggest disappointment here was that there aren't actually any floating islands ;)
We visited the mountain for 2 consecutive days, sleeping at the top for one night in a dorm. It was a bit expensive to stay at the top (ie. $8 CAD for a coffee, $34 CAD/person in a 6-bed dorm room), but it was definitely worth it as it takes some time to make it off of the really touristy paths and onto the less visited trails.
If you're super lucky (ie. if the mountains aren't covered in clouds, rain or fog), you can enjoy an absolutely magnificent sunset and/or sunrise. Surprisingly, even at 5:30AM, there were as many crowds of chinese tourists as during mid-day. Here are some pics of the sunset that we were lucky enough to see.
And here is the sunrise…. overall, we were super lucky with the weather conditions!!
One particularity of Yellow Mountain, which is hard to appreciate from the pictures, are the paths. The 30+ kilometres of paths mainly consist of stairs.. over 10,000 stone steps zigzag up and down between the various mountain peaks. On rare occasion, we were actually lucky enough to encounter a flat area to allow our calves and knees to recuperate. We also discovered that if your legs finally give up, you can hire someone to carry you up/down the stairs…. ichhhhh… seems like HARD work!! Workers there are also paid by weight to carry all of the merchandise/stock/supplies/gas/water/etc. up and down the stone step paths, from the gondola to the various stores and hotels. They use basic bamboo sticks as lever-style-backpacks that carry about 200+ pounds (on average)…. it sure makes us realize how much we love our jobs!
There were about as many chinese tourists as there are stairs!!. It was actually impressive how many there were. On the path near the gondola there were so many tourists that we had full-on gridlock - a walking traffic stand-still. Luckily, in the more remote areas, there were far less people so we could actually enjoy the scenery in silence.
We were also lucky encounter an entertaining family of monkeys that came up to visit us.
And what would be a hiking trip without some funny jumping pictures...
All in all this was one of the best landscapes we've seen on our trip, so far!