Struggling up China’s sacred Huangshan mountains

The choice between taking a package tour and blazing your own trail to a given destination has big repercussions, for the experience itself but also for what it says about the intention of the traveler.

Huangshan (黄山), in eastern China’s Anhui Province, is a rugged and misty range of mountains that has long sat prominently in the national Chinese psyche. Today Huangshan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and there are two ways to get to the tiny tourist village the top, where the famous sunrise can be viewed.

You can take a cable car, or you can walk up a series of steep stone steps yourself.

Tourists opting for the former – that is, most of them – ride in their big comfy bus to the base of Huangshan, where the bus is parked in a large dedicated lot. The crowd all step off the bus and queue up for the cable car. It arrives at the appointed time, begins its steady ascent, and a few minutes later the tourists are standing on a flat, rocky area looking down on the clouds.

Masayo and I, on Day 25 of our Chinese odyssey, decided to walk up ourselves. Not only would skipping the cable car save money, but we weren’t pressed for time anyway. Why not spend some time getting to know the mountain rather than just being whisked up and missing everything in between the base and the top? Surely there’s more to a destination than just arriving there.

We left our big bags at our hotel in Tangkou and got a ride to the base of Huangshan. As we paid for our tickets (all visitors have to pony up an admission fee, cable car or not) I saw a sign warning climbers not to enjoy the views on their way up.

The stone steps zig zag haphazardly back and forth up the mountain. Some sections are steeper than others, but at no time was it easy. Masayo and I are not athletes and had mostly been relaxing and working on our computers in the weeks leading up to this climb. Our legs protested but we pressed on.

We proved unable to follow the sign’s advice to disregard the views – they were all around us and invariably inspiring. Huangshan isn’t Alpine; it’s rocky granite, jagged everywhere. Trees stick improbably to mountainsides as your eye is drawn across otherworldly landscapes, and everywhere is a sense of ancient wonder, of nature at its most transcendental.

There were almost no other climbing tourists, but we didn’t have the steps to ourselves: porters, laden with implausibly heavy-looking loads hanging from the ends of sticks they’d heaved onto their shoulders, would come huffing their way up or grunting their way down. I couldn’t understand why the authorities didn’t just shuttle supplies back and forth with the cable car outside tourist hours instead of paying these strong, tired-looking porters.

But when they came, we always stepped aside and let them pass. It certainly made our frivolous task seem less daunting. Here we are on vacation, choosing to climb, but how many times a day do these people have to do this?

All in all, it took us four hours to reach the top of Huangshan. The cable car crowds were there, milling around, snapping photos, laughing and posing, and generally sticking together. They didn’t look tired, but we sure were.

But the chilly air and the adrenaline of climbing energized us; the views were indeed fantastic from the top, and it was all the more special since we’d “earned” the mountain by climbing it. Our experience was vastly different from those groups that had shot up here in twenty minutes, chatting to one another with the presumptuous and indulgent air of doted-upon clients.

There were various platforms for viewing different angles, and Masayo and I scrambled around the paths between them and gawked at this and that. Our favorite was a nearby rocky platform with a small rock sat on top – it was said to look like the back of a contemplative monkey. And indeed it did.

There is a small enclave of hotels and snack shops at the top (including, for some unknowable reason, a basketball court), but in an effort to save money we had opted for dorm room space in bunk beds, and bought an instant rice dish for dinner in the hotel lobby.

Adding water per the package’s instructions, we were embarrassed as steam began to rise from the self-heating pack. We bought drinks from the bar in hopes that they wouldn’t kick us out for filling the lobby with great billowing plumes.

It worked; they left us alone and we ate our hard-won dinner and sipped our respective beer and tea and felt rather pleased with ourselves.

At 10:00 pm we had to retire to our gender-separated dorm rooms. Each was large, with about 20 bunk beds in it, and in both the lights were out and all the other people – mostly Chinese tourists – were already asleep. I wondered if they always slept this early, or if it was special for this tour. And if so, how do they all force themselves to sleep just because it’s time? They were really snoring and everything.

At 3:00 am, it became clear why everyone had retired so early – they were getting up, now. Lights came on, people started waking and talking en masse, and the noise level gradually rose until it was impossible to ignore it.

“Who wakes up at 3:00 am?!” I wondered. We were here to see the sunrise, too, but that was still a couple of hours off. Evidence of that very Asian phenomenon: the plan drawn up with no consideration of logic or potential suffering.

Giving up on sleep I went to the rapidly emptying women’s dorm room, where Masayo lay in bed, awake and dazed by the schedule that had been imposed on us. “Who wakes up at 3:00 am?!” she asked me blearily.

The unfortunate answer had become clear: “We do.”

We stumbled outside where Huangshan was very cold and dark. We shivered and strolled around for an hour or two before a snack stand finally opened and we could buy hot milk tea and some rolls for breakfast.

It was also about the time that the sky started to light up. Best of all, there was a viewing platform with nobody else on it – the tourists had all been shunted off somewhere else for their own carefully planned sunrise viewing.

In fact, it was too foggy this morning to see the actual sunrise, but standing on top of chilly China as the day broke, sipping warm tea and having no other distractions, was quite a magical moment. All the struggle of yesterday’s climb, and the catch-as-catch-can nature of our meals and the incomprehensibility of the hotel schedule, led to this amazing moment. We stood on our own personal platform, having merited all the beauty that surrounded us.

But we couldn’t exactly relax all morning: we had yet to get back down Huangshan.

Rather than go back down the way we came up, we saw on a map that you could walk a couple of kilometers to a tiny village and go down from there by a different route. Obviously, the unknown is the best choice.

The two kilometers was mostly flat and led through amazing groves of pine trees whose every little needle was encased in its own ice sheath. No other tourists were here; it was too far to walk for them and there was no automatic transportation.

We did meet another Western traveler, a guy from San Diego. We stopped to chat with him which turned into a half-hour discussion (it turns out he stayed overnight on the other peak, and his experiences with unconscionably noisy tourists was very similar to ours) before both parties continued on their way.

Climbing down the stone steps today turned out to be a little different than yesterday. For one thing, my knees objected strongly to it. Up was ok, down was much harder. I resorted to side-stepping down some sections just to give my knees a break. Masayo thought this quite comical.

Mainly, though, the icy wind that blew unforgivingly around the exposed rock faces was the overriding factor of the trip down. Up and down the stairs we trudged, looking like the opening scene of Aguirre but there were only two of us, sometimes blocked by a large stone wall but then turning a corner and being blasted by the howling gales.

As we got lower Masayo started to get more and more worn out, and the last part was rather tough going. We peeled off layer after layer as the air got warmer and stiller, and the vegetation became greener. Finally at the bottom and not having any idea where we were, we negotiated a price with a taxi driver who took us back to the hotel in Tangkou.

And so we had conquered Huangshan. We did everything ourselves – getting up and getting back down. And the experience was all the more better for it. The aches in our legs were the warm feeling of accomplishment. The time we’d spent climbing instead of taking a cable car was time for reflection and for rejuvenation of spirit.

And the relationship we will always feel with this misty, mystical Chinese mountain experience was forged both by the mountains’ generous offers of beauty and wisdom, and our dedication to genuinely taking the time to get to know them.

What have you seen while traveling that you felt you had earned?

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