1st May – Hongcun to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain)

This morning we have a quick snack for breakfast & leave the guest house at 6 am for our 40 km drive to Huangshan. The village  of Honcun looks lovely & tranquil in the early morning light

Huangsham is a bright town full of restaurants to cater for the many tourists who come here to visit Yellow Mountain.

Huangshan is at the base of Yellow Mountain which is a very important place for Chinese people to visit and as it’s the 1^st May Labour day holiday we are expecting it to be extremely busy. Yellow Mountain was not named so for its colour but rather named after the Yellow Emperor who climbed the mountain and bathed in the hot springs which gave him youth.

We catch a bus to the start of the cable car which is a 20 minute ride in a gondala over a very steep ravine with rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood & pine trees growing. Only some of the plants are flowering at the moment so it will be a sea of colour in a few weeks.

As we climb higher the sheer smooth granite mountain reveals itself and quite amazingly the pine trees grow straight out of the rock & stand tall, it’s beautiful & quite majestic.  Once off the cable car We climb up a long steep set of stairs and walk to the welcoming pine.

We spend a couple of hours exploring different paths & taking in the lovely views.  It snows up on the top of the mountain in winter although we only go to about 1,800 metres.

There are walking paths all over the mountain but we stay to the easy ones. It starts raining lightly and the visibility over the mountain is reduced but we keep exploring different paths, although some of the steps get a bit slippery.

The rain gets heavier so we decide to go down off the mountain & catch the cable car back down. We then spend some time in the town exploring the local market which has lovely fresh vegetables, fruit, meat & other unknown things.

For dinner tonight we have a delicious roast goose!