The Floating Mountains

I just arrived back from a two day trek in Huangshan, aka the Yellow Mountains. Immediately upon starting the hike I could tell why James Cameron got his idea for Avatar's Floating Mountains from. The views were very obstructed from heavy fog until we (I hiked with a Dutch girl I met at my hostel) reached the Cloud Dispelling Pavilion. The name is very accurate, for there we had our first views of the amazing mountains. They seem to form right out of the fog. The geology there is amazing, the peaks themselves have a fantasy look to them, and they're sheer cliffs rise up so far from the ground. Some of the trails are literally on the edge of these huge cliffs, and you get a great view of the hundreds of meters drop into the fog below.

The second day we tried to wake up early to catch the sunrise, but apparently not early enough. I figured waking up at 5am would be sufficient, but apparently the sun rises at the ungodly hour of 4:30 am in Huangshan. Fortunately, the skies were clearer and the views were much, much better. We climbed up to Celestial Peak, the highest point in the park. The views there were amazing, and the stairway down was steep as hell. Some of the nomenclature in the park is pretty comical. Some of the peaks had cheezy names like "Turtle Carrying Golden Turtle Peak" or "Monkey Looking At the Sea Peak", etc. Now at this point in the morning I had started to become fed up with Chinese tourists; for instance, the girl at the peak that kept bumping into everyone, when we're standing near the edge of a few hundred meter drop. Or the huge tour groups with the guide that spoke into a microphone that was excessively amplified through a speaker attached to his hip. I'm glad we don't have that kind of thing on the trails back home, and I'll do everything in my power to stop that if they happen to show up there. I did manage to extract some positive from the crowds when I got a hilarious picture of a fat Chinese man being hauled up on a chair by two porters, smiling the whole way. I thought that was funny as hell. Unfortunately since I can't orient the photos in my post because I have to email them, you'll see the photo before the description and the dramatic value is somewhat lost.