Day 62: Huang Shan (黃山)

Sunrise
Had to wake up at 5am today to catch the sunrise, it was tough, but we managed.  We ran around to 3 different locations that we thought would be good place for pictures and all but 1 of them had too many people there, so we chose the one with only a couple people.  We did actually get to see the sunrise which we were worried about due to how cloudy it was the day before, while it made good pictures it wasnt as magnificent as was described.

From 77 Days in China

From where we were the sun rose right over the peak of a mountain

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

Breakfast
After the sunrise we went back to our hotel, only a couple minutes away, and had some coffee and instant noodles for breakfast.  Who could think of a better breakfast before starting a 7 hour hike?

Hike down the western stairs
Notice I wrote DOWN, we were at the top of the mountain, obviously we would be hiking down.  Little did we know we would hike down to the base of the gorge by 10am.  The problem is then you have to hike to the top of another mountain, before hiking back down to the base again!  We made it down and back up again, then partway down, before having to take a gondola the rest of the way in fear we might miss our bus if we hiked the final 2 hours, in addition there was so much fog again we figured we weren't missing much.

I posted a lot of pictures here, but its just a fraction of what we took, but I have no time now to go through them all!

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Met this guy as we started our hike

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Top of the mountain

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Before we started the hike

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There were A LOT of stairs

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From 77 Days in China

Also some hiking through small caves

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From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

They carved monkeys into some of the handrails

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From 77 Days in China

Rocks and trees would seem to come from nowhere

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From 77 Days in China

At the bottom of this is where we would walk, the distance to the bottom was about as high as the distance from the walkway to the top

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zoomed in

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Zoomed in even more

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More stairs

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Steep stairs

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View from the bottom, you can see the walkway on the right hand mountains

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Zoomed in

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From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

Walkway to a cave

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The fog rolled in fast

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From 77 Days in China

Lots of fog

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From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

From 77 Days in China

You can see a mountain peak sticking out of the fog

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On an overhang

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Charlotte on a bridge between two rocks

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One of my favorite pictures

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Charlotte looking over a sea of clouds

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That rock does not look too safe

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At least we didn't have to carry that much stuff!

Back to Hangzhou
We then took the 3 hour bus back to Hangzhou, Charlotte immediately got a massage at a blind massage parlor where all the masseuses are blind.  She said they did a really good job and her knee that was hurting after the hike felt a lot better