Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain) is one of the scared mountains of China and being only 600 miles from Shanghai was picked as our next destination.

We arrived by (excruciatingly slow overnight) train at Tunxi (also known as Huang Shan City) 70km to the south of the mountains and got ourselves a room in a hotel conveniently sandwiched between the railway and police stations.

The follwing day a bus got us to the town of Tangkou at the foot of the mountain and a short taxi ride took us to the start of the Western Steps, roughly 800m above sea level. From here it is a five minute cable car ride to the top. The alternative is 1000m vertical metres of stairs, which allowing for some downs on the way up is about equal to 7,000 steps. Amazingly, we kept getting overtaken by porters carrying large loads hanging from split bamboo poles. The majority of the steps have been literally carved from the granite and in places the trail lead through fissures barely wide enough to squeeze through sideways.

After 3.5 hours we had climbed 900m to the Jade Screen, the location of the upper cable car station, which just left the unsettlingly vertical steps to the 1863m summit of the Lotus Peak. Many people choose to stay the night in one of several (expensive) hostels on the mountain in order to get up early and watch the sunrise (the clouds fill the valleys, leaving the ridges and peaks exposed). We chose instead just to enjoy the view as it was and then be on our way. From the summit the view was stunning, rows of ridges and peaks fading into the blue horizon, and in the town of Tangkou barely visible as a grey smudge. The highest point itself was rather small and after lingering for a few minutes B and I set off again.

Needing to get back to Tangkou for the last bus we descended via a different route to the cable car station. The way back passed through more dark tunnels, across a bridge between two mountains and along a stone walkway cantilevered off a vertical wall. Reaching the cable car station we were suprised to find no queues at all and jumped into the next available pod. Rather disconcertingly, the car trundled sedately through the boarding area before accelerating over the precipice into several hundred feet of open air. After the initial shock, it was a pleasant descent to where we had started several hours earlier.

We need not have worried about finding a bus though, a whole army of minibusses were camped out in the carpark and it was not difficult to find one willing to take us for a good price and we made it back to Tunxi in about half the time of the outward journey (it was downhill).

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