Week 3: Yellow Mountain

This week I decided to get out of Shanghai and go see some of the famous natural sights in China. To this end I joined a trip to Yellow Mountain in Huangshan. It was advertised as a 2-day challenging trek which included a night at a hotel in the mountains and some fantastic views of one of UNESCO’s world sites.

It was challenging indeed. Apparently in China, hiking consists of a whole lot of stairs. Climbing Yellow Mountain was like walking up to the 10,000 floor of a building. While the official stair counts varied, the lowest I have recorded was over 17,000 steps during the day, over 80% of which were of the vertical nature. Needless to say, my legs were a bit worn out by the end of the day.

Luckily, we got some amazing views out of the steep climb. While it rained the entirety of the second day in the mountains, the first included some breathtaking vistas of geological formations that you will not find anywhere else I have been. The natural beauty was breathtaking (or maybe that was just the stairs!) and it was a great get-away from the smog of Shanghai. The second day it was raining hard and it was impossible to see much through the fog-there’s something very disconcerting about walking along a stone staircase and looking over the railing into a void of mist. However, if the wind picked up and you glanced down at just the right time, you could see some of the shapes of the mountainside below, peaking up at you.

One of the most interesting things about hiking in China is that you can actually get carried up the mountain, if you’re in a touristy enough area. Never mind the numerous cable cars and funiculars that are available for the ascent: you can hire living, breathing, human Sherpas. Unfortunately with the bad weather the second day I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing one of these teams in action, but due to the low cost of labor in China it looked like a pretty good deal! I was also amazed by the regular trash areas created for all the tourists: in my naïve experience of “carry in, carry out” it was astonishing to think that every 100 meters or so you could just dump your trash and someone would come by to clean it up later. However, for the number of people who were on the mountain while we were hiking, it was incredibly clean, so the Chinese must be doing something right!