Huang Shan / Yellow Mountain
At the beginning of June of 2014, we were able to go to Huang Shan with our dear friends Jordan and Jacob Rogers. (They unfortunately don't live in China anymore... Miss you guys!) We had heard awesome things about this gorgeous mountain range! We were thrilled to take a quick trip to this amazing place! It is just outside of Shanghai, so we decided to take a bus there which took about 6 hours. We had heard that it could rain that weekend, but we decided to tough it out and still go. A little rain never hurt anyone right? Well, after arriving in the mid-afternoon, we went to our hostel to get a good nights rest. The guy that rented to us was so nice. The little town was so humble and was fun to see. He recommended that we do just a little hike/walk to some place called Emerald Pools (I believe...) before heading to bed. It is famous and a few famous Chinese movies were filmed here.
Those mountains, where it was foggy, yeah... That was where we were going to go hike the next day. Accept that we were about 1000 feet higher than that... (that number is an approximation...) We were a tad worried that we made a bad choice.
We woke up bright and early so we could have the day on the hike. There are many routes that you can take, and we decided that we wanted to see this bad boy... So we took this route which took a few hours to get to!
Gorgeous right? Well the forecast was a little rainy! We again figured that we could definitely still hike in the weather. We were taken up towards the base of the mountain in that picture before this, and we had to wait to get on a bus. That bus then took us up through the tiny, freaky, winding roads up the mountain. And they do not go slow up that mountain! Hahah... It really was frightening. As we got higher and higher, it got more foggy. After about a 20 minute bus ride up the mountain, we then had to take another tram even higher up into the mountain. And it was pouring. And it did not stop pouring- the ENTIRE day. I am not talking about just a drizzle... It was pouring. And it was foggy. So yes. This is exactly what our view looked like all day. And yes, we did look amazing while at it:)
OH and YES... This is what that gorgeous bridge looked like at that time. Such a bummer! But at least we went, and had great company!! We climbed a million stairs!
These were the kinds of stairs we hiked, all morning and afternoon! They were either straight up or staight down! Although we couldn't see the beauty around us, we could definitely feel that we were surrounded by something great.
And that concludes are lovely hike. Once we decided we were done, well that our legs were done... They were SO tired from going up and down stairs all morning. At the very end of our hike, we waited 3 hours to take the tram down... After being totally exhausted, that was not what we wanted to do. The last 30 minutes of that wait, the fog went away! And we finally saw some of the gorgeous mountains surrounding us! Haha we didn't take a picture, but it was gorgeous!
Lesson learned? Don't ever travel to a place that says it is 90% chance of precipitation and thunder and lightening storms.
