Huangshan (the name means "yellow mountain") is considered one of the greatest natural sites in China. Officially, it’s ranked the second most beautiful spot after Guilin. (Only in China are sites officially ranked in order of their natural beauty.) But I had never given it much thought until recently, when my buddy Paul said he wanted to spend a weekend hiking there and invited me along. It’s also exciting to find somewhere good to go that’s not on the official grand tour of China, and Huangshan, for some unknown reason, seemed to have been left off most people’s list.
In any case, it sounded like a good trip: you fly to southern Anhui Province (about 45 minutes from Shanghai), hike up the mountain one day via the relatively easy Eastern steps (or wimp out and take the cable car), get up for the sunrise when the mountains, the mist, and the sun are supposed to look particularly good together, and then hike down the long, arduous Western steps.
We had a very early first day and were setting off uphill from Huangshan gate with our backpacks on by about 9:30 am. (This after cab ride of a bit over an hour in a through some wonderful scenery—people plowing small terraced fields in a light drizzle with a wooden plow behind a water buffalo, wearing those big round straw ‘coolie’ hats—like "The Good Earth" had some basis in reality after all. Our cab driver thought it inadvisable to go up the mountain in these conditions. He said we should really stay in town overnight and go up the next day. In fact, he felt so strongly against it that, against our explicit instructions, he took us to a hotel where he thought we should stay—can you say, "kickback?" Finally, after being told that he could choose between taking us to the mountain and not getting paid, he reluctantly deposited us at the Huangshan gate.)
One way to do the ascent is to take a minibus right to the cable car platform, but hey, we were here to hike, right? It soon started to rain more heavily and after an hour or so, we stopped off at a pavilion on top of a small hill to dry off. There seemed to be some lovely scenery already, but it was almost completely hidden by a dense, dense fog. This was a theme to be repeated throughout the trip. In any case, we soon managed to flag down one of those minibuses, and stop of for an overpriced (another theme to be repeated) hotel lunch before catching that cable car up the mountain. The ride was like swimming in a bowl of milk, knowing that the sides of the bowl are beautifully painted but not being able to make them out at all.
After checking in, we were able to dry off and re-outfit ourselves in the appropriate clothing for Huangshan. They sell these garments that are essentially like garbage bags, except made out of more colorful plastic and shaped to fit the human body. They’re cheap and, apparently, designed to last for a few hours at a time. Then, without the backpacks, a little walk around the summit to see what all the fuss is about. The scenery really is amazing stuff; it gives you a sense of what traditional Chinese painting landscape is all about, the rocks, the mists, the pine trees in odd locations and twisted tortured poses.
At all the lookout points there were heavy chains wrapped around and around, each bristling with padlocks. The tradition is that lovers will have their names engraved on a lock, and then hike up the mountain together to fasten it where it will symbolize the permanence of their relationship. There’s a saying that after you have climbed Huangshan, you will never want to climb another mountain. This is a saying that can, of course, be taken in a couple of ways. At least one is, Who’s gonna want to climb back up there to see if their lock is still there?
There were very few western tourists, but lots of what in China you are required to call "Overseas Chinese"—i.e., people who emigrated however many generations ago but are still claimed by the Chinese government (though of course they have to pay, when applicable, the same overinflated non-Chinese prices that people like me do.)
The safety apparatus is minimal to say the least. In front of a sheer drop of hundreds of feet, there will be perhaps a single, rusting iron pipe about 3 feet off the ground (In the US, there’d be an impermeable fence about 10 feet back from the drop—and stiff fines for anyone who climbed over it.) In one way, it’s nice that you get to make your own decision about how close to death you want to come on any given day. On the other hand, I would guess that people must get hurt fairly regularly, especially considering how many older folks there are gamely scrambling around on the wet uneven rocks in street shoes, often holding a walking stick in one hand, a cigarette in another and then balancing their camera however they can.
Almost as incredible as the mountains themselves are the stone staircases which have been built all through them. There is no such thing as walking on a path—for one thing, there’s no dirt up here. For another, the Chinese seem to have a fairly restricted idea of what it means to commune with nature. They don’t necessarily want to go anywhere much wilder than say Central Park.
So these absolutely amazing stone staircases have been built covering the entire site. All in all, Huangshan is roughly comparable in size and splendor to Yosemite (and, come to think of it, they’re not that different in overcrowding and touristyness—though Huangshan has been a tourist site for about 1,000 years longer, since the 8th Century.) It’s sort of like someone built a staircase up to the top of half-dome, and then you could go down another set of stairs on the other side that would take you over to Touallame Grove (sp?).
In the morning it was dry for a few hours. We got up just a bit late for the 5:30 sunrise—the most famous sight at Huangshan which is supposed to look like a sun (the sun) rising over a sea (the mists) dotted with small islands (the mountain peaks)—but we were there in time to get the general idea.
Later that morning, we set off on our big day long hike down the western steps. There was a light rain, but we were better equipped—those plastic garbage bag garments, plus rain ponchos. We started by climbing about 2,000 stone steps up to a place called Brightness Peak. It was hard going and I am just thankful that the path curved enough to keep you from seeing too far ahead. If you knew how far it was you’d never make it. At the top, a crowd of tourists, like a flock of birds in their multicolored ponchos all milling around and squawking. And because of the fog there was absolutely no view. We could see nothing at all. Ask to see my photos. Nothing.
It’s on the descent, however, where things get absolutely incredible. Bizarre, grotesque rock formations, waterfalls big and small, exposed staircases, incredibly twisting, turning and steep pathways. Repeatedly, you’d head down something that seemed a certain dead end, only to see the path twist around, maybe go through a rock, and come out somewhere you couldn’t have imagined.
Periodically, you’d meet guys coming up the mountain balancing heavy loads of food, etc. on the opposite ends of a pole—or, occasionally, two guys carrying a tourist in a sedan chair—up miles of stairs, some as steep as climbing a ladder out of a manhole, and you stop wondering why everything is three times as expensive at the top of the mountain than the already tourist-inflated prices at the bottom. The most remarkable sights were around a place called the Jade Screen Tower. I’m not sure exactly what the Jade Screen itself was—the fog was still so thick that we probably missed half, if not more, of the sights. (I never did lay eyes on the "Welcoming Pine," which is the symbol of the Huangshan, anywhere outside of a souvenir stand.) We also passed up a lot of possible alternative routes; after a few hours of hiking I had an automatic prejudice against any pathway appearing to involve any degree of uphill activity. But what we did see was absolutely incredible.
And we were constantly meeting very nice people, mostly Overseas Chinese, a lot of them from Malaysia who spoke English quite well. At first, of course, you’re skittish about being approached by Chinese people you don’t know in a touristy place. Whenever you travel in China, you find yourself accosted over and over by people who want you to buy their postcards, eat at their restaurant, stay at their hotel, come to "meet a Chinese girl" and who literally won’t take no for an answer. There can be a good deal of poking and pulling; a lot of travelers have some sort of breakdown at one point or another where they just can’t politely refuse anymore and find themselves lashing out.
The Indian writer Vikram Seth, wrote a good book ("From Heaven Lake") about a trip he took in the early 1980s overland from the Silk Road area in Northwest China overland through Tibet to Nepal. (He was able to make the trip because at some obscure police station in Quinghai an absent minded official stamped his visa as good for travel to Tibet—permission which was very hard to get in those years.)
Seth points out what he sees as a powerful division in the Chinese character, at least in the way they treat outsiders. One the one hand, when acting as bureaucrats or, by extension, people who deal with travelers over and over again, Chinese people can be unfathomably insensitive. Lovers of regulation. Completely cold hearted to the personal needs or difficulties of others. In short, people who would fit right in at the New York City board of ed.
The redeeming irony, however, is the boundless generosity that you consistently find in Chinese people who you meet casually, who are not official representatives and do not want to sell you anything and therefore, in one sense, have no obligation to care about you, but do so selflessly and openly. On the mountain, we met a lot of people in this second category.
The second half of the descent is less spectacular—you are mostly following a stream down through its ravine and there are fewer open views. Also, concentration becomes more difficult and more important: taking one step at a time, steps numbering in the thousands, all wet and slippery, in a place where a fall would be serious business, with a heavy backpack on. (The stairs are quite well designed, however, with grooves in the tops of them to keep the water from building.)
At one of our many rest stops, an older man from Sichuan gave me his souvenir cane. I’m not sure why he didn’t want it, but the cane made all the difference in getting down the stairs. At about five, we finally stumbled out the bottom and, after the usual negotiations hassle, took a quick taxi ride to check into a hotel by the hot springs at the base of the mountain. Unfortunately, the hot springs themselves were very unappealing, so we didn’t go in.
The next morning, the rain was down to a minimum (I don’t know for how long it is ever truly not raining there), so I took a little walk around the valley to stretch out my aching muscles. Sitting in a little pavilion over the river, I watched the fog roll in and just take over again, obliterating the view completely.
On our last day, we hired a minivan and driver to take us around for the afternoon. First a quick lunch in the local town of Tangko, a little town most notable for its scenic situation alongside a charming river, with bridges of all manner, from impressive stonework to jerryrigged planks crossing it every 50 feet or so, and huge piles of trash strewn all around.
Then we saw a few sites in the countryside: the Xin An Stele garden and a place where the great Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai apparently once got drunk and wrote a poem (neither of these being a particularly rare occurrence, if you have any familiarity with Li Bai); that little town of Xi Xian, which has a famous 4-sided archway next to it’s old city gate; the Tang Yue ceremonial archways and a restored Ming era residence known as "The Former Home of Bao’s Clan."
But the best thing about this day was just seeing so much of the Anhui countryside. (We’re a little short on countryside here in Shanghai.) For the first couple of hours, everything was hilly mountain roads through river valleys, the river alternately blue and rushing, green and still; steep, incredibly verdant hills covered in rows of tea plants (and people, again in those big straw hats, up there picking the tea). At one point, we passed a woman squatting down cultivating a strip of land maybe 18 inches wide and 20 feet long wedged in between the edge of the road and the sharp drop of the hill.
Then it got flat: people growing rice in little dyked-in patches, flooded to a depth of about a food. More people working with wooden plows behind water buffalo. Periodically, we’d see odd, somewhat decrepit temple-like towers sticking up in the middle of the fields like Chinese versions of the leaning tower of Pisa, with trees growing up on the roof.
We then spent the afternoon and evening killing time in Huangshan city, getting lost in pedicabs and having dinner in one of these red plastic tents where you point at the food and they cook it to order. This was the only really good meal we had all weekend, and the only one that cost not much more than to what we’d pay at home in Shanghai. We were really wiped out by this time, but mercifully, the flight to Shanghai was on time and the cab home was quick.