Day 2 (Nov 6 Monday): Huang Shan

The buffet breakfast at Red Chamber Hotel is probably the best for this particular tour with good selection of both Chinese and Western dishes. And I love particularly the freshly made "deep fried flour stick", right Peter?

The bus ride from Hangzhou to Huang Shan is about four hours. And it'll reduce to three after completion of the highway in late 2007, Originally we plan either to take a direct flight from HK to Huang Shan or take a boat ride after touring Thousand Lakes Isles. Reportedly there's no direct flight to Huang Shan after Nov 1 and we simply don't have enough time to add another tourist spot. Our driver is much better than the one we'd for the Grand Canyon/Las Vegas tour in our 2005 LA reunion, And the pitstop (for answering the call of nature) is amazingly good. The wives were really impressed with the cleaniness and the number of toilets available. Winnie decided on the spot (or was it in Day 1) to rate all the WC facilities during the tour. Apparently she'll come up with a final report after Peter & Jeannette have provided her with some missing photos.

During the bus ride besides the usual passing around of snack, our local guide Ah Ding; told us stories about the "Red Tophat Merchant Wu", Champion Scolar Village (which still hold the top honor with Scholar Champion) etc. We finally arrived at Huang Shan before 13:00. The weather so far has been very nice. Huang Shan supposedly rain 2/3 of the time but we're 'lucky' though that means "no rain, no sea of cloud". But even there's rain "sea of cloud" is not guaranteed since it's also depend on wind direction and optimal temperature.

We'd our lunch at the foot of the mountain. The local cuisine is notably oily and hot (not as hot as Sze Chuan though) but more than acceptable and satisfactory to all, I believe. As 'foreigners' we're entitled to avoid the hour long queue for the cable car and can go straight to the VIP lounge at the appointed time. And for the Huang Shan tour, we'd another local local guide, a requirement to protect the indigenous. Well that's much better than Hua Shan where for the sake of creating jobs you've to take ride on their dedicated bus and get your cable car ticket examines several times before and after the ascent to the mountain.

Danny and Esther are probably the best equipped for hiking and bring along their own metallic collapsible walking sticks. Maggie and I bought the cheapest ones available (@ RMB5) which probably are recycled items. Others got the better ones at slightly higher price and Justin's mother-in-law got herself a real bargain since its her second trip to Huang Shan and know how to deal with the locals.

The cable car ride is very smooth (probably much better than accident prone Npong Ping 360 @ Lantau Island) and takes about 15 minutes. We'd left behind our main luggage with the driver at the bus; and I'd the heaviest backpack with my camera equipment. Apparently the tourist company are worried about our ability since they know about our collective age of 1,000 (that's should be a fairly accurate estimation)! So we don't have to hike the front trail which can be treacherous and take about seven hours. We tour mainly the "West Sea" which already include some fabulous vistas. We got a team of professional photographers of two who tag along and take video and photo for us. Our dear Winnie purposely displayed her second umbrella (the first one is a panda shaped one) with our high school logo. Unfortunately no one has listened to her advice and sing our school song during the video taking. Most of us did buy the VCD (after viewing the sample at my hotel room after the dinner which has a footage of 40+ minutes and 50% of which are introducton of Huang Shan overall sceneries) for RMB110. And some did get the group photo or individual ones during dinner.

After the tour of "West Sea", we checked into the Shilin Hotel "Lion Forest", the newest and a 4-star hotel (the best available). It so happened that they'd in the hotel exhibition of the first photo competition of Huang Shan. That's an added bonus for shutterbug like me. Since the temperature was single digit and quite dark outside (in spite of the still full moon), we did not venture outside of the hotel except a brief look at the moon. The dinner was ok. The hotels (three of them in the vicinity of West & North Sea) rely totally on porters (they won't use the cable cars since they've to service tourists and maintain job for the local porters) to carry food, laundry, accessories etc. So don't expect too much. Nevertheless, the dinner was acceptable. Though we avoided the game meat and most of all dog meat! There're massage services at the hotel but I don't think any of us employ the service in view of the relatively high price (that's vis-a-vis other part of China). We want but couldn't play bridge at the lobby since the hotel personnel treat that as gambling. So we have to wait until we checked into Suzhou hotel when we'd our first rubber.

Our morning call was 05:30, an hour later than what we expected (as told at the Pre-tour Tea Party in HK). And by the time we reached the first tier spot for watching sun rise, it was quite crowded already. We hiked to the second level (about 10 minutes) and managed to squeeze into a better position of photo taking and where I could set up my tripod. And it turned out that we should have gone to the third level (another 15-20 minutes hike) in order to really see the sunrise! At the level where we were we could only see a partial sunrise at best. I did mention this to the tour operator when they called me upon my return to HK as wrap up interview. I told them that they should have given us the option of getting up earlier, says, at 04:30 and spend an hour or more under freezing temperature. And its our call. Well that's probably is the only hiccup of the entire tour. Personally I'd get up at 04:30 though don't know about the others.

After the sunrise, we began the last leg of our Huang Shan tour, North Sea. Though we don't have time to go to places like Peak of Brightness, Alien Rock etc or seeing the other two best four - Sea of Cloud and Hot Spring, I'm still flabbergast by the first two, viz Pines & rock Formations. While Maggie may not want to come back here again, I probably will. Anyone?