home of the self-proclaimed king of trees

as promised, the huang shan post.

so this past week, tyler, clark and i rolled out early saturday morning heading west to huang shan. we got on the bus at the bus station at 7:30 am or so, only to discover that the actually station was only one of the places where people can board the bus. people were just randomly getting on the bus at different times, paying touts who had arranged the deal, and not the people at the bus station. it seems that, quite unlike the trains, the government is just another actor in the largely private sphere of bus transportation.

the bus trip sucked. they kept playing these horrible music videos on VCD, which included one collection of chinese pop songs set to what appeared to be american wet t-shirt contests and strippers dancing. the one bright spot on the entertainment aspect was thunder in paradise 3, starring terry "hulk" hogan, but tragically that was snuffed out for some reason. also, we discovered that even though there was a brand spanking new highway linking hangzhou to huang shan, the bus we were on elected not to take it. in short, what we expected to be a four and a half hour journey took about seven hours.

we finally arrived at huang shan, and were greeted with a spectactular weather and a view of the mountain, which is actually quite remarkable. here is a view that we took while climbing on that first day to the summit area.

we got to our hotel and were directed immediately to the cheap seats behind, where we met up with joy, who had come up earlier in the morning by the harder western steps route, which we later descended. After watching the sunset, we hit the sack early in order to get up at 4:30 am for the famous sunrise the next day. before going to sleep, this older korean guy who was staying in the same dorm room as us showed us all the places on the map we should see, which was every single place on the map.

after watching the sunrise, which was pretty good, but nothing spectacular, were started our trek down, and met up with the hordes of chinese tourists that had been pretty nonexistant the day before. but we managed to find our way through them to the highest peak. i thought the stairs up tai shan were killer (see post back in january), but the stairs at huang shan are just insane. they are carved out of the rock itself, and incredibly steep and hang out over nothing. here is a picture of tyler chilling among the chinese crowds at the top. see if you can find him.

we descended quickly after that, and caught the bus back to hangzhou. that bus was thankfully more comfortable, took the expressway, and had some decent movies, including johnny english, which was tragically cut short by a faulty disc. and that was that.

classes are dreadfully easy and boring. this week i embarked on an in-depth study of tic-tac-toe, and have reached a level of understanding of the game never before seen. but we have only two weeks left or so, then finals, and then it's off to shanghai, xinjiang, gansu, yunnan, hong kong, and vietnam!

that's it for now. as always, thanks for reading.