---

It was a short night as we had the drunk Chinese guy running up and down the halls at all hours of the night. As I convinced Scott to sleep in a bit, we get a later start than originally planned, as we do not get out of the hotel until 9:30 am. We headed to the bus station with a detour to get some snacks for the climb. We bought our tickets by 10:30 am. We headed through the Yongu gate with the plan of taking the gondola up on the east side and walking down the west side. When we turned the corner to the gondola our hearts sank as the line was HUGE. We ended up waiting in line for the gondola for 2.5 hours. We were thrilled when we finally got to the top of White Goose Ridge. We walked up to the map to get our bearing compared to our map and discovered they are not the same. The names are different and ours is obviously an artist rendition. Not finding any body to ask questions of, at that point we are the only foreigner in sight. The locals have no English skills. We did end up running into some other foreigners along the way that seemed as lost as we were. We headed off in the direction that we thought seemed logical.
For all those that think you take the Gondola up and then just walk down…..don’t disillusion yourself. Mount Huangshan is made up of multiple peaks. For every down there is an up. Scott likes to tell me as I am huffing and puffing that for every up there is a down. We enjoy a beautiful afternoon of hiking around taking photos and avoiding Chinese tour groups, with the latter being an impossibility. With the loss of 2.5 hours waiting in the gondola line, we had decided to walk the majority of the west route and then take the lower west gondola down off the mountain. The plan seemed logical (always a killer). As we approached 5:00 we were hoping that we would get the gondola before dusk, it seemed right around the corner on the map. At 5:30 we arrived at the gondola to find out that it closed at 4:30, which makes no sense at all. We continued on feeling a little hopeless, as we had been hiking for 4.5 hours and knew we had a ways to go still. And we were not even confident that we knew exactly the way since our map was “embellished”. As it became DARK we arrived at Jade Screen Peak, which has a hotel on it. We inquired within and they said the only way off the mountain was in the dark and that we should stay at the hotel. The rates were absurd ($200+). We talked it over and decided that my health was worth the money, Scott was afraid my clumsy butt would fall down the trail (especially if it was like the steep narrow stairs that we had climbed earlier). They claimed to be a four star hotel, but I knew it could not be true when they told us we would only have hot water from 19:30 to 21:30 that night and none in the morning.
Once we had a key in hand we headed to the restaurant to eat, it was packed. They squeezed us into a corner at a broken table. It was fine for us. We just wanted some food in our belly and to get a good night sleep. We planned to get up early and head down the gondola. We needed to be able to shower and check out of our hotel and catch a 9:00 am bus to Wuhan.

---