Serious mountaineering with VIPs

Trip Start Jul 01, 2006
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7
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Trip End Aug 28, 2006


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Saturday, August 19, 2006

We went to Huangshan after leaving Shanghai. Jane picked us up at the airport and brought us to the hotel, which is called the Old Street Hotel, in Tunxi (Stay there! Awesome Chinese-style rooms with killer beds for like $30US!). We got there late so we just went to bed. In the morning we walked around Old Street and saw the stuff for sale, and my parents saw an inkstone shaped like a mountain range that they wanted. I found the monkey paiting that was there the last time I went to Huangshan a month ago. We decided to shop after the mountain, so we left at noon and Jane's husband took us to the eastern steps, the side I didn't go on last time. On the way there we saw a monkey on the side of the road, and I taught my dad one of the only three words he learned in Chinese, houzi (monkey - sounds like "hoser"). The cable car line was not bad at all and it only took us about a half hour to get on the cable car and get started up the mountain. The east side of the mountain is BUSY! It was really annoying to walk around such a beautiful nature park but be unable to enjoy it because there were tour guides screaming into megaphones and people swarming everywhere.

We walked the 2/3 mile to the hotel (serious mountaineering!) and checked in. The Xihai Hotel sucks! I originally wanted the Shilin or Beihai, but the Shilin was full and some government officials requisitioned the room I had reserved at the Beihai, so we ended up at this shitty place. The first room they tried to give me smelled all fucked up, and they made one of us take a room with a view of another building rather than the mountain, even though the price was the same. The food was really expensive and sucked. I went to the foot massage place and that was also really expensive, and the lady had the cheek to ask me for a tip! I guess that's a habit in Huangshan because it happened to me the last time.

We walked over to the Grand Canyon of the Western Sea, which had really awesome views that were much different than the views on the west side. Huangshan is cool because you can see some really good views without much effort, although my parents might not agree about the "not much effort" part.

In the morning we came to the cable car station only to find out that the line was 4 hours long! We were going to walk down to avoid the wait, but some guy that worked there told me that my parents could go on the VIP cable car because they were seniors (although neither of them count as seniors because you have to be 70 in China). So, we waited an hour and took the cable car down with some of the government officials after sitting in the "VIP waiting room" (AKA rip-off shop) and buying some jade to "thank" the manager for getting us out of the long line.

After we got down the mountain we met Jane and went to a nearby monkey park so we could see the Tibetan macaques there. They were really cute, much furrier than most monkeys I have seen and with shorter torsos. After the houzi we went to see a couple of small villages in the area, which were also really nice.

We flew out that night, but not until after I argued all day with the owner of the monkey painting on Old Street and with the people at the shop with the inkstone. My dad finally went out and swindled both of them down to their lowest prices, but not until we were almost ready to leave without having bought either. I can't believe he got a better price than I did on the painting without even speaking Chinese!

The flight to Beijing was whatever, but we got the exit row, which pissed off some scruffy-looking bird on the plane who yelled at the flight attendant for letting foreigners sit there.
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