It was actually a relief to get out of Nanjing in the end. We had meant to go there for 3 or 4 days and ended up being there 8. On the last morning I got up at the crack of dawn and went to the Public Security Bureau and collected my visa (which looked as though it had actually been ready for 3 days which is a bit of a bummer but I think you have to do what the police tell you in China and they said pick it up Thursday not Tuesday). Anyway, so instead of getting ourselves down the old train journey in pkenty of time we decided to start arsing about, having breakfast, lunch, posting parcels back (which ironically turned out to be well easy; would have been sending cheap stuff back all along if I'd know it was that easy!!), chilling with the hostel staff etc. So, obviously, by the time we got the show on the road to get down the train station we were running a bit late meaning that by the time we actually got to the train station we were running really late. It was an interesting sprint through the station...it can be quite a challenge trying to read the Chinese writing to work out your train platform while your bag is going through the scanner (I have no idea at all why they scan every bag going into stations here; and even less so as they don't seem to look at the screens to see if there is any contraband in the bags anyway). Anyway, we managed to get to the train just before it pulled away from the station.
As this was a daytime train we had decided to just go for the hard seat option; this is basically second class. This was all fine but there were some right characters; one guy and his wife just constantly stared at us. At first I thought they were out to rob us or something like that but after a few hours I came to the conclusion that in fact they were just straight out of the country (complete with some plastic buckets with all their cooking utensils) and had probably never seen westerners before and hence felt the need to tug at the hairs on my arms etc. They kept trying to get us to order food everytime a trolley came past etc; I guess just so that they could see us eatig and stuff.
Now then; China is a bloody big country with a hell of a lot of people. Everyone knows this. But it really is impossible to explain the scale of this country. You only really get a feel for it when you trundle through towns on the train which are not even marked in the 1026 page Lonely Planet and they must have millions of inhabitants. Even small towns in the book turn out to have 4.6 million inhabitants. Everywhere I have been there are mile upon mile of new apartment buildings going up. What on earth with happen to all the construction workers when they are finished building I have no idea. At some point it has to stop as the whole country is covered with new power stations, cities, houses etc being built. Every apartment has an air conditioning unit and most people seem to have electric bikes so it is easy to see why this country has an electricity shortage and has to build a new power station every day.
Huangshan is China's most famous mountain and is accessed from a town called Tunxi (also called Huangshan Shi just to complicate things) that we stayed in for a night. We stayed in the youth hostel there. I have to say the Chinese youth hostels are amazing quality. There are dorn rooms but since we have 2 of us it is only a little bit more expensive to have our own room so we have never used the dorms. The room we had in Tunxi was quality with the bed on a raised area, tv, air con nice toilet etc. There was also a DVD watching area and stuff in the hostel that we never got the opportunity to use as we had to be up early in the morning to get train tickets and get onto the mountain. Getting the train tickets south was a bit of a mission as she only had one ticket. However, as there was no queue we just stood around looking pathetic for a bit and low and beyhold she was suddenly able to reverse the rule that train tickets could only be bought for trains departing from the same station as booking and she got us a ticket from another town such that we could just join the train in Tunxi. And then it was off to the mountain...and this is where things started to get expensive...to try and put this in perspective let me describe 2 days outlay:
Day 1 - leaving Nanjing
Breakfast (dumpling soup) - 2 Yuan
Subway ticket - 2 Yuan
Lunch (rice and stir fry) - 12 Yuan
Train ticket to Tunxi - 27 Yuan
Dinner (instant noodles on train) - 5 Yuan
Accomodation (our own room) - 50 Yuan each
Total = 98 Yuan (₤7)..Even this is equivalent to more than a whole days wages of a lot of people in China.
Day 2 - Huangshan mountain
Breakfast (noodle soup in hostel) - 18 Yuan
Bus to town below mountain - 13 Yuan
Lunch before mountain (rice and stir fry) - 37 Yuan
Taxi to beginning of mountain - 25 Yuan
Entrance fee into mountain - 200 Yuan
Cable car up mountain - 80 Yuan
Dinner (instand noodles and some preserved meat) - 30 Yuan
Beer - 30 Yuan
Accomodation (bunk bed in dorm room) - 200 Yuan. For the most expensive rooms in the hotels on the mountain it was over ₤100 a night!!
Total = 633 (₤45). Now this is affordable for a day out for me but how on earth Chinese people are supposed to afford this I don't know. Despite this the mountain is full of Chinese students and their girl friends for whom this must be the equivalent of a whole months going out money for one day on a mountain. It is especially bad that you cannot go to your own mountains without paying a fortune. Though I have to say the paths etc are amazing, even the toilets on Huangshan have 3 or 4 stars...meaning they weven have sit down toilets and toilet paper!!
I did also manage to spent 200 Yuan on a hand painted picture that an old man brought round to our table when we were having lunch. It looked really good...whether it still does when I eventually lug it home will be a different matter as it was definetly a spur of the moment purchase.
Now, you may be asking why we got the cable car up the mountain...it is very unlike me but the reason for this was that we thought we had found an old path up the mountain that would avoid paying the entrance fee to the park...after 2 hours climbing up this path (the steps and bridges made from bamboo) with a couple from Argentina it just ended and it appears the path was built for porters to carry the building materials for the cable car. By the time we discovered we had gone the wrong way it was raining quite heavily and we had to get to our booked accommodation on the summit so we had to jump in the gondola - this was quite an achievement for Dave as he has pretty bad vertigo.
Huangshan itself is quite amazing; not for the geology and scenery as extolled by all the signs (the Chinese do like to tell you how beautiful something is like they have to indoctrinate) but for the scale of the hotels etc built on the top of a mountain. I was expecting a few mountain huts and guesthouses but instead there are basically 5 star hoteks built on top of a mountain. And they are still building them - all of the materials, including granite and marble tiles, being carried up the hill by porters...I think the hotels are used for weddings a lot. In the evenings there is basically nothing going on; since all the Chinese people have spent every penny they have getting onto the mountain they just sit in their room eating instant noodles and watching TV. I have to say, I have developed a bit of an addiction to these instant noodles, they are like massive pot noodles and come in some really spicy varieties that are brilliant for breakfast on a long train journey.
Perhaps the oddest thing on the mountain is that smoking is prohibited outside so the hotels and toilets are full of men (generally it is only the men who smoke in Asia) smoking.
And at 8pm it was lights out in the dorm as my little friend had informed me he would wake me up at 4am so we could all go see the sunrise....after a reasonable nights sleep with only a small amount of dorm room snoring the party began at around 4am with lots of texting between the boys in our dorm and their girlfriends in the girls dorms. I duly got up when shaken by my little Chinese mate (who had been really helpful to me the night before translating some English into Chinese so that I could get a padlock engraved for Dave and Jing's wedding - the Chinese attach padlocks to chains at the tops oof mountains with expressions of their unending love so I thought it would be nice to attach one for Dave and Jing and give them a copy to attach themselves when they next visit one of the sacred mountains) and walked outside...which was right in the clouds and pissing down with rain so I went straight back to bed cursing the stupid Chinese for thinking there would be a sunrise in this weather. How annoyed was I when we eventually got up and set off at 6am to find the sun high in the sky and not a cloud to be seen (as of course our dorm room didn't have any windows to see what was happening with the weather).
The first few hours of the day were fun, clambering up peaks and going along cliffs on suspended pathways but by the time it got to lunchtime it was unbearably busy on the mountain. So busy in fact that we had to queue where the path narrowed. As usual all the Chinese people were in tour groups, their leaders with little flags and megaphones to tell them how beautiful the rocks they are currently looking at are. So by 1pm we were on our way down again after our most expensive day in China. It was definetly worth it but the experience was not as good as on the other mountain (Hua Shan) than we went to.
Have a look at the video attached to this blog to see what mountain life is all about...
So were off the mountain by 5pm and then just had to hang around in the hostel until our train at 11.45. It was just as well they let us shower etc in the hostel as it was gonna be a long old 40 hour journey to Sanya next.
Huang Shan photos
Huangshan Hotels
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