Breathtaking Huang Shan (Yellow Mountains)

Posted On July 8, 2013

Our next destination was Huang Shan home of the Yellow Mountains. Getting there was a bit of an Odyssey. In theory the plan was easy, take a cab to the long distance bus station a bit out of the city and take a bus to Tangkou.

Unfortunately getting a cab in Hangzhou seemed quite impossible as all cabs were full. We tried at several corners for more than an hour but weren’t successful. So plan B was to take a few public buses and so it took us more than two hours to get to the bus station. Definitely a travel tale to remember. Once on the long distance bus it was a uneventful seven hour bus ride to Tangkou.

The next morning we were up at six (early for being on “holidays”) and after a bowl of porridge our hotel host brought us to the park pick up place. As so often (read always) in China we were not the only tourists and so we started queuing for the bus bringing us to the cable car station. There were several tour groups with their noisy tour guides (all equipped with microphones and personal loud speakers) either wearing yellow or red hats (don’t ask us why).

After buying the entry tickets we were soon in a nice Austrian-built cable car who brought us up the mountain (we were really too lazy to do the several hours climb).

We had not been promised too much by people saying the Huang Shan (also known as Yellow Mountains) are some of the finest mountains in China. Common believe is that once you had been at Huang Shan there was no need to climb any other Chinese mountains (Hazel especially liked that). The views of the very distinct mountain formations were indeed breathtaking – hard to describe (even the pictures can’t entirely capture it). The whole area was quite big and so for the next few hours we wandered from one platform to the next, enjoyed the views and took one photo after the other.

At one corner there were thousands of locks locked on the railings symbolizing eternal love for the owners (the story has its roots in an old Chinese tale about a couple of lovers who committed suicide at this spot) and for sure we also locked our lock. We hope it will last.

Despite the large number of tourists and the countless steps we had to walk up and down Huang Shan was an absolute highlight on our China trip and we were glad we came.