Huang Shan

This weekend the Chinese celebrated the mid-autumn festival and we got a four-day weekend. My friends Gina, Kristen, and I chose to visit Huang Shan (黄山) which can be literally translated to Yellow Mountain.

Huang Shan is a six plus hour train ride North of Nanjing. We left Nanjing Thursday night and bought hard bed tickets for the overnight train ride. Some of our less forward thinking friends headed for a different city on the same train made the mistake of purchasing hard seat tickets. They enjoyed a more cultural 7 hour train ride in extremely close and uncomfortable quarters.

When we arrived in Huangshan City it was about 4:30 AM and we were immediately approached by people trying to sell us tickets for a shuttle to the foot of the mountain for 25 RMB. Our guide book (that is a couple years old) told us to only pay 10. We finally found a shuttle bus to take us. I asked the girl I was sitting next to how much her ticket cost and she told me 15 RMB. Toward the end of the ride the tour guide started to collect the money. She tried to make Gina, Kristen, and I pay 18 RMB. We told her it wasn’t fair to charge us 18 and everyone else 15 and asked her why we had to pay more. Her response was because we were wai guo ren, or foreigners, we should pay more. We only gave her 15 RMB. Later we heard her talking to some of the Chinese in our group telling them to befriend us.

It was such a change to go from Nanjing, where people have been nothing but friendly and accommodating, to a touristier place where people will blatantly try to take advantage of us.

That morning we took a cable car up the mountain, it was an extremely overcast day and we couldn’t see anything on our ride up the mountain. At the top we hiked around a bit and found out hotel. The clouds made it difficult to grasp the beauty or enormity of the mountains but what we could see was beautiful.

Every time we stopped to take pictures we were approached by Chinese tourists who wanted to take pictures with the white girls. They would try to speak English or just use hand gestures and we would respond in Chinese, each time we spoke Chinese they would either laugh hysterically (apparently white people speaking Chinese is hilarious) or shockingly reply (in Chinese) “You can speak Chinese!”


We made one particular group of friend who were particularly amused with us. Without fail we would run into them about every twenty minutes. As we approached the three same men would start chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” which of course never got old. We had planned to watch the sunset that night, but we couldn’t see it through the clouds.

Saturday morning was too cloudy to see the sunrise like we’d planned, but the sky cleared as we started our descent down the western steps of the mountain. The views were amazing, despite the crowds of people. The hike was longer than we’d anticipated but totally worth it.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain we took a shuttle back to Huangshan City where we planned to take a bus to another small and old city in the region. Because the hike took us longer than we’d thought we missed the bus. The plan was just to spend the night in Huangshan City but first we decided to buy our train tickets back to Nanjing for the next night. They were sold out of everything but the hard-seat. Having learned our lesson from our friends, we decided to come home a day early on the hard-sleepers. I was disappointed that our trip was cut short but I think seeing the beauty of Huang Shan was totally worth it.

---

---