Huangshan Memories
This was originally an email I sent to Jon and Julie, cowritten with KP. We wrote this in an internet cafe at the Hangzhou train station, the night before we left for Shanghai.
We decided to go to Huangshan after all, so we took a bus out to the Huangshan Youth Hostel in Huangshan Si. It turns out Huangshan Si is quite a ways from the actual Huangshan mountain. Woops.
When we got to the bus station at Huangshan Si, a taxi driver got on the bus and asked if we wanted to go somewhere. We told him we wanted to go to the youth hostel so he said he'd take us for five kwai. That sounded like a good deal, so we said, "sure!"
As it turns out, we were about ten feet from the door of the youth hostel. He couldn't turn left because of the center divider so he drove us all the way around the block.
He was the first of many that tried to rip us off. I didn't believe that it was possible, but they were even worse than the money-crazed people in Guilin.
That evening, KP and I enjoyed an excellent meal. We walked down an alley behind our hostel looking for something to eat, and we happened across a little point-and-eat place, which had only one table. The proprietor was thrilled to have American business, and he quickly cooked us up some rice, fish-head soup, and stir fried vegetables while we watched. It was like having a personal chef or being on a live cooking show.
The next morning, we took a bus to the mountain. A lady on the bus started talking to KP while I was sleeping and she managed to convince her that we should get off the bus before we got to the bus station, at a hotel. It turned out that she owned the hotel and she wanted us to stay there.
She told us that we were foolhardy to want to climb the mountain, that it was too late and it was going to rain, and we were going to be doomed, doomed!!!
She told us that we should stay at her hotel for 80 kwai for the night, and that if we stayed on the mountain we'd have to pay 850 yuan.
Unfortunately for her, I knew that she was lying because Lonely Planet said the climb would only take 3 hours, so I finally got mad and stormed away, with KP in tow, yelling "ZAI JIAN!!!" at the ladies. Another lady was still chasing us with maps and raincoats, and I got mad at her and yelled "BU YAO, XIE XIE!!!" which I felt bad about later, because she looked like I'd punched her. When you are completely exhausted and people are trying to strip your pockets though, you tend to get frustrated and lose your temper, and that was really the first time I yelled at anyone in China.
After that, we went to find a bank (a pointless quest, as it turned out—there were ATMs on the mountain), but the lady that we asked directions of only wanted to know if we wanted to eat something, so we ordered two bowls of Huangshan noodles.
Then she told us it was late and we shouldn't climb the mountain, and we should stay at her place for...80 yuan.
However, when we declined politely, she pointed us towards a bank, which turned out to be a crappy Bank of China branch. However, if staying on the mountain was going to cost us 850 yuan, we were afraid that we needed money, so KP went to change some bills.
It didn't have an ATM, and inside the bank there was just one teller and there were a bunch of ladies taking out money. One got out some American money. She spent a long time staring at the 20 dollar bill, because she thought it was so cool.
Then a bunch of giggly girls came and withdrew 200 yuan each. They all gave the teller a satisfactory rating on his little star meter. By then we were sick of waiting, so we decided to give him an unsatisfactory rating if he didn't change all of our money!
When KP pulled out a hundred dollar bill the two guys in line behind us got really excited and crowded around to see it. The bank manager spent a long time studying the two bills with a magnifying glass before deciding that one of them was a counterfeit and giving it back.
However, he deigned to change the other bill and a traveler's check.
We were going to give him an unsatisfactory rating, and he knew it, so he didn't push the button to let us rate him!
Finally, we went to climb the mountain, but first we had to find a bus to the gate.
A view of Yellow Mountain from outside the Bank of China
As we walked towards the bus station, taxies kept pulling up and asking where we wanted to go, and offering us 50 kwai rides to the train station, which wasn't where we wanted to go at all.
Finally a guy pulled over and asked if we wanted to go to the gate, so we said yes, and KP negotiated him down to 20 kwai.
It turned out to be the most exciting 20 kwai we ever spent.
This man fancied himself a racecar driver, so he drove his Red Flag sedan up the curvy mountain road ridiculously fast, and passed on all the curves with tour buses coming the other direction. The seats were faux leather, so we slid back and forth on every turn, and had a lot of fun doing so.
Finally, after cheating death for 20 minutes, we got to the gate. The entrance fee was 200 kwai, but there was a student discount. I was excited about that because I had an honest-to-goodness Chinese student ID. I proudy pulled it out and gave it to the lady but when she looked at it she started yelling indignantly about how I was trying to pull a fast one on her, and finally handed it back.
It was the ID of the guy from Xi'an who had climbed Emei Shan with me and Jon!
We must have accidentally switched IDs at the Emei Shan gate. The lady saw how upset I was so she said she was sorry she doubted me and she was sure I really did have a student ID but since it was at Emei Shan, I had to pay 200 yuan. But since KP had hers, she only had to pay 100.
Then we climbed the stairs to the top. It was pretty easy, especially compared to Emei Shan. KP said, "That was easy, like eating a cake!"
KP strikes a confident pose.
When we got to the top it was nearly sunset, and we were standing over a sea of clouds. We walked to "Beginning to Believe Peak". It was the most beautiful place either of us had ever been, and it put Emei Shan to shame. It also put Guilin to shame.
And then it got dark.
We went to find a hotel. A guy came running up and offered us a room for 70 kwai. We thought that sounded good, since we'd been told we would pay 850 kwai.
We said to ourselves, "we're not picky!"
But then he led us to a concrete block building with tiny little airless rooms, each with 4 little cots and no windows.
We said, "do you have any other rooms?"
"No," he said, "they're all the same." So we decided to look around some more.
Next door was another place, that looked slightly nicer. We asked about the price and they said we could have a double for 280 or a quad for 80 yuan each. We tried to bargain them down, but the guy would only reduce his price to 240 yuan.
We said, "Tai Gui La!" which means "Too Expensive!"
But they were empty words. We went to another hotel to look, and they had 280 kwai/pp rooms that had 7 people in them, and it was a five minute walk from the main hotel. We went back with our tails between our legs to the other place and got the 240 kwai room.
Our hotel was pretty nice except for the bathroom
Then we went to find dinner. We went into the restaurant in the bigger hotel and asked about the buffet. They told us that it was 100 yuan each, so we ordered regular dishes. A few minutes later another couple came in and they got the buffet for 50 yuan each. It made me really angry but KP made me calm down. It's hard to explain, but in the tourist-trap areas, people just don't know how to get my money away from me. You see, I can easily afford to spend 100 yuan for dinner, but I want to feel like I'm being treated fairly. So whenever I caught someone trying to do that to me, I just left.
We planned to get up for the amazing sunrise, but when we awoke, we found the mountain enveloped in thick fog accompanied by a torrential downpour!
We got up and looked for a sunrise anyway, but it was too late, and pouring,
so we went back to bed hoping the rain would lift. It didn't. At noon, we left the hotel, and hiked up to Bright Summit (the third highest peak, and i think the only one of the three you can hike up to).
Me at the summit. Notice how my umbrella has been destroyed and I am thoroughly drenched.
We asked the concession stand lady if we could take the cable car off the western steps, but it was closed due to the weather. We didn't want to walk for 10 hours in the pouring rain, so we took the eastern cable car down the mountain. When we got there, we felt bad, so we went on a hike to find the nine-dragon waterfall.
We found a spectacular view of the mountain, and then a trail through a beautiful bamboo forest that passed through a bunch of cascades.
This was an absolutely unbelievable sight, and even the panorama can't do it justice, because of the massive cascades coming down the sides of the mountain.
KP walks through the bamboo forest with her umbrella. I was thrilled because a bamboo forest like this is one of the top things I wanted to see in China.
We hiked and got soaking wet, but we never found the waterfall. At one of the cascades, the trail had worn away and it was like a waterslide and a cliff in one. I told KP to be careful not to slip, and then I promptly slipped, and scared us both half to death, because it was a long way down in the middle of nowhere.
This is where I almost slipped off the side of the mountain. Photomosaic.
Eventually we stopped, because we were afraid of being stuck in the dark on the trail, so we went back. When we got back to the gate there was a taxi sitting there. We asked to go back down the mountain. He said he'd go for 50 kwai. And of course, since we had paid 20 to get up the moutnain, we said, "Tai Gui La!"
To which he replied that we had no choice because he was the last taxi.
The chinese love a little extortion!
Eventually, when nobody else came he took us down the hill for 30 kwai, if we agreed to stay at the hotel of his choosing. When we got there, we bargained them down to 80 kwai for the room, and bought bus tickets back to Hangzhou.
The drive to Hangzhou should only take 6 hours, but I guess we got discount tickets, because it ended up taking 11 hours, during which the bus driver mostly showed 1980's Chinese music videos, which just show women walking around in frumpy dresses or one piece bathing suits, leaning against light or telephone poles. Aaaaaah!
We did see some interesting things, like really old villages with only one or two modern buildings. People on the side of the road would periodically hail the bus and we'd pick them up. In China, you need sometimes need papers to travel from one province to another. You have to show them at the bus station, but not if you're picked up on the side of the road. However, at one point, it turned out that we were beign followed by an unmarked police car, and when we picked up a couple of passengers, they stopped us and dragged them off the bus. The men didn't have the proper papers, so the police let them off—with a 100 kwai going to each officer to smooth things out, thankyouverymuchhaveaniceday.
We decided to go to Huangshan after all, so we took a bus out to the Huangshan Youth Hostel in Huangshan Si. It turns out Huangshan Si is quite a ways from the actual Huangshan mountain. Woops.
When we got to the bus station at Huangshan Si, a taxi driver got on the bus and asked if we wanted to go somewhere. We told him we wanted to go to the youth hostel so he said he'd take us for five kwai. That sounded like a good deal, so we said, "sure!"
As it turns out, we were about ten feet from the door of the youth hostel. He couldn't turn left because of the center divider so he drove us all the way around the block.
He was the first of many that tried to rip us off. I didn't believe that it was possible, but they were even worse than the money-crazed people in Guilin.
That evening, KP and I enjoyed an excellent meal. We walked down an alley behind our hostel looking for something to eat, and we happened across a little point-and-eat place, which had only one table. The proprietor was thrilled to have American business, and he quickly cooked us up some rice, fish-head soup, and stir fried vegetables while we watched. It was like having a personal chef or being on a live cooking show.
The next morning, we took a bus to the mountain. A lady on the bus started talking to KP while I was sleeping and she managed to convince her that we should get off the bus before we got to the bus station, at a hotel. It turned out that she owned the hotel and she wanted us to stay there.
She told us that we were foolhardy to want to climb the mountain, that it was too late and it was going to rain, and we were going to be doomed, doomed!!!
She told us that we should stay at her hotel for 80 kwai for the night, and that if we stayed on the mountain we'd have to pay 850 yuan.
Unfortunately for her, I knew that she was lying because Lonely Planet said the climb would only take 3 hours, so I finally got mad and stormed away, with KP in tow, yelling "ZAI JIAN!!!" at the ladies. Another lady was still chasing us with maps and raincoats, and I got mad at her and yelled "BU YAO, XIE XIE!!!" which I felt bad about later, because she looked like I'd punched her. When you are completely exhausted and people are trying to strip your pockets though, you tend to get frustrated and lose your temper, and that was really the first time I yelled at anyone in China.
After that, we went to find a bank (a pointless quest, as it turned out—there were ATMs on the mountain), but the lady that we asked directions of only wanted to know if we wanted to eat something, so we ordered two bowls of Huangshan noodles.
Then she told us it was late and we shouldn't climb the mountain, and we should stay at her place for...80 yuan.
However, when we declined politely, she pointed us towards a bank, which turned out to be a crappy Bank of China branch. However, if staying on the mountain was going to cost us 850 yuan, we were afraid that we needed money, so KP went to change some bills.
It didn't have an ATM, and inside the bank there was just one teller and there were a bunch of ladies taking out money. One got out some American money. She spent a long time staring at the 20 dollar bill, because she thought it was so cool.
Then a bunch of giggly girls came and withdrew 200 yuan each. They all gave the teller a satisfactory rating on his little star meter. By then we were sick of waiting, so we decided to give him an unsatisfactory rating if he didn't change all of our money!
When KP pulled out a hundred dollar bill the two guys in line behind us got really excited and crowded around to see it. The bank manager spent a long time studying the two bills with a magnifying glass before deciding that one of them was a counterfeit and giving it back.
However, he deigned to change the other bill and a traveler's check.
We were going to give him an unsatisfactory rating, and he knew it, so he didn't push the button to let us rate him!
Finally, we went to climb the mountain, but first we had to find a bus to the gate.
A view of Yellow Mountain from outside the Bank of China
As we walked towards the bus station, taxies kept pulling up and asking where we wanted to go, and offering us 50 kwai rides to the train station, which wasn't where we wanted to go at all.
Finally a guy pulled over and asked if we wanted to go to the gate, so we said yes, and KP negotiated him down to 20 kwai.
It turned out to be the most exciting 20 kwai we ever spent.
This man fancied himself a racecar driver, so he drove his Red Flag sedan up the curvy mountain road ridiculously fast, and passed on all the curves with tour buses coming the other direction. The seats were faux leather, so we slid back and forth on every turn, and had a lot of fun doing so.
Finally, after cheating death for 20 minutes, we got to the gate. The entrance fee was 200 kwai, but there was a student discount. I was excited about that because I had an honest-to-goodness Chinese student ID. I proudy pulled it out and gave it to the lady but when she looked at it she started yelling indignantly about how I was trying to pull a fast one on her, and finally handed it back.
It was the ID of the guy from Xi'an who had climbed Emei Shan with me and Jon!
We must have accidentally switched IDs at the Emei Shan gate. The lady saw how upset I was so she said she was sorry she doubted me and she was sure I really did have a student ID but since it was at Emei Shan, I had to pay 200 yuan. But since KP had hers, she only had to pay 100.
Then we climbed the stairs to the top. It was pretty easy, especially compared to Emei Shan. KP said, "That was easy, like eating a cake!"
KP strikes a confident pose.
When we got to the top it was nearly sunset, and we were standing over a sea of clouds. We walked to "Beginning to Believe Peak". It was the most beautiful place either of us had ever been, and it put Emei Shan to shame. It also put Guilin to shame.
And then it got dark.
A 30 second exposure at ISO 800 yields this moonlit view of the mountain with stars in the sky
We went to find a hotel. A guy came running up and offered us a room for 70 kwai. We thought that sounded good, since we'd been told we would pay 850 kwai.
We said to ourselves, "we're not picky!"
But then he led us to a concrete block building with tiny little airless rooms, each with 4 little cots and no windows.
We said, "do you have any other rooms?"
"No," he said, "they're all the same." So we decided to look around some more.
Next door was another place, that looked slightly nicer. We asked about the price and they said we could have a double for 280 or a quad for 80 yuan each. We tried to bargain them down, but the guy would only reduce his price to 240 yuan.
We said, "Tai Gui La!" which means "Too Expensive!"
But they were empty words. We went to another hotel to look, and they had 280 kwai/pp rooms that had 7 people in them, and it was a five minute walk from the main hotel. We went back with our tails between our legs to the other place and got the 240 kwai room.
Our hotel was pretty nice except for the bathroom
Then we went to find dinner. We went into the restaurant in the bigger hotel and asked about the buffet. They told us that it was 100 yuan each, so we ordered regular dishes. A few minutes later another couple came in and they got the buffet for 50 yuan each. It made me really angry but KP made me calm down. It's hard to explain, but in the tourist-trap areas, people just don't know how to get my money away from me. You see, I can easily afford to spend 100 yuan for dinner, but I want to feel like I'm being treated fairly. So whenever I caught someone trying to do that to me, I just left.
We planned to get up for the amazing sunrise, but when we awoke, we found the mountain enveloped in thick fog accompanied by a torrential downpour!
We got up and looked for a sunrise anyway, but it was too late, and pouring,
so we went back to bed hoping the rain would lift. It didn't. At noon, we left the hotel, and hiked up to Bright Summit (the third highest peak, and i think the only one of the three you can hike up to).
Me at the summit. Notice how my umbrella has been destroyed and I am thoroughly drenched.
We asked the concession stand lady if we could take the cable car off the western steps, but it was closed due to the weather. We didn't want to walk for 10 hours in the pouring rain, so we took the eastern cable car down the mountain. When we got there, we felt bad, so we went on a hike to find the nine-dragon waterfall.
We found a spectacular view of the mountain, and then a trail through a beautiful bamboo forest that passed through a bunch of cascades.
This was an absolutely unbelievable sight, and even the panorama can't do it justice, because of the massive cascades coming down the sides of the mountain.
KP walks through the bamboo forest with her umbrella. I was thrilled because a bamboo forest like this is one of the top things I wanted to see in China.
We hiked and got soaking wet, but we never found the waterfall. At one of the cascades, the trail had worn away and it was like a waterslide and a cliff in one. I told KP to be careful not to slip, and then I promptly slipped, and scared us both half to death, because it was a long way down in the middle of nowhere.
This is where I almost slipped off the side of the mountain. Photomosaic.
Eventually we stopped, because we were afraid of being stuck in the dark on the trail, so we went back. When we got back to the gate there was a taxi sitting there. We asked to go back down the mountain. He said he'd go for 50 kwai. And of course, since we had paid 20 to get up the moutnain, we said, "Tai Gui La!"
To which he replied that we had no choice because he was the last taxi.
The chinese love a little extortion!
Eventually, when nobody else came he took us down the hill for 30 kwai, if we agreed to stay at the hotel of his choosing. When we got there, we bargained them down to 80 kwai for the room, and bought bus tickets back to Hangzhou.
The drive to Hangzhou should only take 6 hours, but I guess we got discount tickets, because it ended up taking 11 hours, during which the bus driver mostly showed 1980's Chinese music videos, which just show women walking around in frumpy dresses or one piece bathing suits, leaning against light or telephone poles. Aaaaaah!
We did see some interesting things, like really old villages with only one or two modern buildings. People on the side of the road would periodically hail the bus and we'd pick them up. In China, you need sometimes need papers to travel from one province to another. You have to show them at the bus station, but not if you're picked up on the side of the road. However, at one point, it turned out that we were beign followed by an unmarked police car, and when we picked up a couple of passengers, they stopped us and dragged them off the bus. The men didn't have the proper papers, so the police let them off—with a 100 kwai going to each officer to smooth things out, thankyouverymuchhaveaniceday.
1 Comments:
Good story and information. Wife and I are going there mid November (Huangshan). Staying 2 1/2 days. Any further suggestions or information outside your blog? Hotel names where you stayed?
By J. De Silva, at 9:05 PM CST
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