Yu He Hotel Tongling

For ages, people can not understand how this huge stone ends up at the tip of the peak and believe the stone has some kind of magic power - fertility. People will bride the stone by stocking coins in a crack and pat the stone. Poor park ranger has to keep cleaning the coins but not taking the coins. It is a brutal task when it is wet, cold and dark.

... people call them pony tail pine because their leaves/branches only grow one direction. For those pine trees grow at the higher altitude areas, people call them Yellow Mountain Pine.

No matter how the tree grows or leaves are heading, their roots are so strong and firm that make those trees grow more generations to come.

Anhui province is home to many beautiful sights and I finally visited a local treasure - Jiuhua Shan in Southern Anhui. It is one of two famous mountains (the other, more famous one is Huang Shan) in the province and is a sacred Buddhist mountain of which there are three more in China. It's name means nine (jiu) blossom ...

... us feel a little uneasy. :) It took about a little over 45 min to get from Huang-shan city airport to Tan-kou where the hotel is. We are staying at Yun Hai Lou (www.yunhailou.com) tonight. The host there was very helpful and nice. Although we were late and the kitchen is already closed, they still made a few dishes for us - simple, but unbelivable taste. :)

... we had a 3 day weekend before that so finally headed to Nanjing. Its a pretty nice city. Lots of laowai around. The first afternoon we revisited the "ladies market" -an underground glowing market and then I dragged Heather on a bit of a tiki-tour to find a wonderful French restaurant (we paid 65RMB/$13NZ for a real nice 3 course meal). Next day we hopped on a bus for Purple Mountain and ...

We have talked Sherry out of taking us to see the famous sunrise on the mountain. We would have to get up at 3 and hike two hours in the dark before breakfast to see it. It is quite cloudy, and think we have seen beautiful sunrises at home, and talk ourselves into sleeping instead. Sherry says the hike down was not far....but, you have to go up thousands of ...

... have no idea what we want, how to pour or serve it. They are really confused. Sherry, our guide has gone to her room, so we are left to attempt this one on our own. Pointing to the bar list, menu, she still does not know what we want. We use our walking sticks to point to the bottles. She manages the four glasses with one ounce each in them. Now....we would like some coke with that. Hmmm, it is listed on the menu separately ...

... of the mountain! This was where it was filmed. There are hundreds of thousands of locks on the chains around the lookouts. I'm sorry I cannot get pictures onto my notes, but try and search Huangshan or Yellow Mountains and you might get a glimpse of where we are. Tomorrow morning we climb down the mountain and continue on to Hangzhou or something like that. The Chinese names are crazy, and are all starting to sound the same.

... pictures, so we climb under the bridge, and get close. They are tied up, with ropes through their noses so we are safe. The buffalo are used for planting, etc. As there is no machinery here whatsoever. After this we see waterbuffalo in every single waterhole and bit of water. So Cool. Every bit of rice is planted by hand, hoed by hand, weeded by hand, harvested by hand. Every square inch of plantable land, ditch, etc is planted with ...

... another bus at the Huangshan front gate, which took us to the base of the eastern steps, one of the two main routes up the mountain (along with the western steps). From there, we boarded the Yungusi cable car, which whisked us up to the Beihai ("North Sea") area, a relatively flat section home to several hotels, actually slightly behind the highest peaks, which are in the Tianhai ("Heavenly Sea") area. After dropping off our bags at the Xihai hotel, we started hiking through Beihai ...