山 (shān) - Mountain

Ah, the Yellow Mountain. It's not quite yellow, but it's definitely a mountain...

...and sometimes, it even looks like a volcano!

China is a very mountainous country - even Beijing is surrounded by mountains, we tend to forget about them because the haze does a pretty good job of covering them up most of the time. The first leg of our vacation was to the Yellow Mountain ("Huangshan" in Chinese), which is located in the Anhui province in eastern China, just a few hours' drive from Shanghai. According to our tour guide, Michael, it is famous for the following:

I think of this as a giant fossil.

1.) "Bizarre" rock formations
Throughout our "4-8 hour hike" up to our hotel at the top of the mountain (the name of which sounded suspiciously similar to "Asshole No. 2"), Michael stopped us every once in a while point out some of the strangest rock formations on Huangshan, which included a turtle, a duck, more turtles, a fish, a giant Buddha-like figure lying on his side, annnnd a giant mobile phone. I couldn't decide which was more bizarre - the rock formations themselves, or the people who discovered the formations in the first place. To your left is a sampling of what we saw - can you spot the
formation? Here's a hint: tilt your head to the left and then look at it again...it really helps.


2.) Ancient pine trees - In addition to the rock formations, there were a number of "famous" pine trees, including the one pictured below. It took me a good five minutes of elbowing my way through the crowd to take the following photo of the "Guest-Greeting Pine."

Again, if you kind of tilt your head to the right and squint....you can kind of see the likeness.

3.) The Sea of Clouds - This was by far the most stunning of the four wonders. I like trees and rocks as much as the next person, but there's something special about walking blindly through a foggy abyss for a few hours, only to find at the top of the mountain that you were really walking through CLOUDS all along. From the top of Huangshan, the sea of clouds looked like a massive, fluffy white blanket. It was a breathtaking view - and not only because I had been doing a lot of climbing.

I just wanted to take a nap in these clouds - we still had a couple hours to go at this point!

4.) Beautiful hot springs - Er...these we had to pay to see these. So we didn't :P

After spending the night at the top of the mountain, we descended Huangshan the next morning and then returned to Huangshan City before going on to see the Thousand Island Lake and Hangzhou. Now that I've gotten myself back into the groove of blogging, I'll probably wrap up the vacation posts with Huangshan City/Hangzhou and resume regular coverage of our last two weeks in China :)

The group on our way up to our 12-bed hostel/hotel room at the top of Huangshan!