24 September 2009

Another early rise today, though a little later than yesterday (4:45 am). We made our way to the Beihai area and then up to Beginning to Believe Peak for a 5:55 am sunrise. The ascent was roughly 20 minutes. We were a little late for the nice viewing areas but we managed to find a ledge at the very top. Again it was too cloudy to really see anything spectacular. So after the clouded sunrise, we headed back to the hotel. Along the way we ran into a group of monkeys hooting and howling. They were very fluffy looking and made funny noises. Arriving back in our room, we had a little breakfast consisting of some chocolate muffins and apples we bought at a shop and leftover potatoes from dinner. We packed up and headed out of the hotel at 8:30am to head down Huangshan via the western stairs.

We wanted to head down the western stairs and so naturally we followed the sign that said Grand Canyon of the West Sea. For whatever reason, I had it in my mind that we would be able to go by the Grand Canyon area before going down. I was a little concerned that it took us away from Brightness Peak, which is the direction the guidebook seemed to point, but thought the trails might merge later on as some tended to do. We locked our "lovers locks" at the West Sea. It is a tourist tradition started about 30 years ago. Married couples will place locks somewhere on the mountain and then throw the keys over the cliff. We were told later by our tour guide that if the couple wants to divorce that they need to find the key at the bottom of the cliff. We didn't throw our keys over (we didn't want to pollute by adding our garbage to the area).

We hiked down spectacular though vertigo-inducing trails winding their way down the Grand Canyon. The only thing that separated us from a vertical plunge all the way to the bottom was a half foot piece of concrete attached to the side of the mountain. There were places that were downright terrifying to go down. After about 3 km of descent we came to the bottom of the Grand Canyon Gorge, however, the trail continuing on to the West Gate was closed for construction. As our only other option was to climb up (i.e. going the opposite of the direction we wanted to go), we were a little concerned. However, the signs did say that if we headed up, we'd still be able to head to the west entrance and so we took the trail back up the mountain. Essentially we came down the mountain only to go back up again. When we hit another fork, we discovered that the way down to the west entrance was another 14.4 km (at this point we had already hiked 6.7 km). We headed down this trail for about 5 minutes but discovered that the trail was very poorly managed and did not look like it had been used in a long time. At this point I wasn't totally sure whether we were on the right face of the mountain and wasn't really willing to risk 14 km to find out.

So we turned back and continued up to the mountain summit to the Heavenly Sea (Tian Hai.) Along the way we kept passing by another girl hiking solo. She did not look like a typical Chinese hiker as she was dressed in shorts, hiking shoes, and had a decent backpack instead of sneakers, jeans, and a laptop bag. We ended up finding out she was from Korea. We also ran into a large group of Swiss who were also trying to get off the mountain. We met up with them as we were heading to the summit and informed them that it was at least a 14km hike down and that we weren't sure that they were actually the western stairs. They decided to turn back as well.

We finally made it to a hotel at the Heavenly Sea and downed two bottles of a Gatorade-like substance and had a bowl of ramen. We were completely exhausted having trekked ~8km up and down mountain ravines only to return to the mountain top 4 hours later. There was no way we were making it down the western stairs in time to make our meeting point with Jack. We were also running on reserve energy and didn't think we could take more up and down climbing. Thus, our next goal was to get to the Yuping Cable Car before it closed at 4:30pm. At the hotel we were informed that it was another 1.5 hour hike to the cable car, which is near the Jade Screen (and the western steps). We trekked up and down for 3.5 km, running into the our Korean friend and the Swiss group.

After 12.7 km of hiking, the glorious sight of the cable car rose in front of us. It was completely worth the 80Y each and was Scotty's favorite part of the day. 8 minutes later we were down the mountain flying over the hundreds of stairs we would have had to climb. At the base we went into the visitors center, which actually had a pretty decent map of the mountain plastered on the wall. This map would have been extremely helpful instead of the crappy tourists maps sold on the mountain. We then were able to see where our original path would have taken us. It would have ended up at the same location but was an extremely roundabout way to go.

The maps on the mountain tended to not have all the locations listed and even if you could find where you wanted to go, it was extremely difficult to orient yourself due to the sparsity of signage on the mountain. Even the small map in our Let's Go Guide did not have a lot of locations making it difficult to find our way around (though we probably should have been able to guide ourselves with the written description of the journey to the west stair.)

Jack picked us up at the bottom after Scotty borrowed a security guard's cell phone. We were then driven ~50 minutes to Hongcun while we had interesting discussions about the autonomous areas of China, ethnic minorities, and Tibet. We checked into the "3 star" Hongcun Hotel (… 3 stars should be taken lightly... more likely a 1 star... but its also the only real hotel in the area.); however, we could care less since it had a warm shower and a bed. We had dinner with Jack at a restaurant down the street. Scotty had a Huangshan beer, which was quite nice. Jack ordered for us – white rice stalk veggie mix, pork and bamboo shoot, and boiled chicken with water chestnut. All was quite good although the chicken was a bit bony for Scotty and I. The waitress was very nice and spoke with us in English with Jack helping to translate every so often. Tomorrow we will tour the ancient city of Hongcun, now immortalized by the images of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

- Julia with Scott's input & edits :)