An Airport Is Still Around Me

White with White on Top: Huangshan Mountain

 

July 24, 2015

By Taylor

 

We woke up early today and caught a bullet train – a train that goes over 200 km an hour and is one of the fastest trains in the world – to the town of Huangshan. It took a little over 1.5 hours. We took a bus and then took another bus that would take us to the place where we would get on the cable car to go to Huangshan mountain.

 

Huangshan means Yellow Mountain in English. It’s a very tall mountain and one of the top sights to see in China. The visit was arranged by the university hosting my dad in Hefei and one of the professors came with us most of the trip – but not up the mountain.

 

When we got to the cable car, it was super rainy and foggy. We had to buy rain ponchos. We took an eight-minute cable car to where we would begin the hike. We would need to hike several hours to get to our hotel and so we each had to carry packs with everything we needed – except for Christian. When we got to the top of the mountain, we couldn’t see a thing. All we could see was white and white and white. Huangshan mountain is known for its views and for hiking above the clouds. Because of the bad weather though, we couldn’t see any views and we were hiking right in the clouds. We stopped at several supposedly amazing lookouts but we couldn’t see more than a couple feet in front of our faces.

 

 

Can you see all the White Around us?

The Trail was Really Neat – Through Rocks and up Stairs

 

Even though we couldn’t see the views, the trail was really neat. It was steep and had tons of stairs and was a little slick because of the rain. While we were hiking, I saw these men carrying lots of food and other supplies dangling from poles across their shoulders. I realized that was how all the supplies got to the top of the mountain. That was the only way to get them there – which was why everything was so expensive.

 

We kept getting confused on the trails because the trails weren’t marked well at all. We had two different maps – but they were different from each other – and neither matched the actual trails. We weren’t really sure we were going the right direction until we saw our hotel (and probably we weren’t going the right direction all the time). We would come to forks in the road and have no idea which way to go. We tried asking people, but they usually didn’t speak English and even if they did, they didn’t have any better maps or know any better than we did which way to go. We had to keep our ponchos on because it was drizzling the whole time. I noticed that most of the other people had the same yellow ponchos on. Even though the weather was bad and we were kind of lost most of the time, we still had lots of fun. Even Christian was a good hiker and didn’t cry. We also had fun reading the signs. Some of them were hilarious. Here are a few: (see if you can figure out what they mean)

 

-Civilization is gold as safe and sound as everything.

-Caring for the scenery and letting your green mood fly.

-Let civilization go with your trip.

Here was the one that made us laugh the most.

 

When we arrived at our hotel, we were all wet and tired and our shoes were squishy and gross. We ate dinner at the hotel. Some of the menu choices were: frogs and stone fungus of Huangshan; hen soup and stone fungus. We just had fried rice, noodles, dumplings and bread.

 

Rachel and my mom got foot massages which are very popular in China. They said they hurt. Chinese massages are very hard. Then we all went to bed.