Visiting Anhui, China: Climbing Huangshan (Yellow Mountain)

This is an edited version of the article originally published by social business consultant Jacob Morgan on his travel blog at Social Media Globetrotter. You can connect directly with Jacob on Twitter at @JacobM.

The Anhui province is located in eastern China and is home to Huangshan or the Yellow Mountain. People come from all around the world to hike up Huangshan to see the amazing “sea of clouds.” It’s called the “sea of clouds” because when you get to the top of the mountain during the sunrise or the sunset the sky looks like a sea of clouds.

Hiking up Huangshan is by no means easy. Before we even got started with the hike we stopped by a local supermarket and picked up some snacks which consisted of water, some sweet buns, and some other random little snacks.

There are two ways to get up the mountain, the eastern steps and the western steps. The western steps take a lot longer but is a much more scenic route; we took these on the way down. We took the eastern steps going up because we wanted to make it before sunset and since the eastern steps take less time we decided to go that route.

Either way, it’s still absolutely exhausting. Most of the hike up the mountain you are literally just going up steps. Imagine a stair master that never ends and that’s Huangshan. However, the hike was definitely worth it!

One of the most amazing things about Huangshan is that all of the supplies (i.e. water, food for the restaurants, snacks, and anything else you cant think of) are carried up by hand; yes, that’s right, by hand. All of the trash or things that are no longer needed are also carried down by hand.

We finally made it to the top of the mountain just in time to catch the sunset.

We woke up early the next morning to catch the sunrise, which was absolutely breathtaking. The only word that really comes to mind is magical. We were perched on the edge of the mountain with dozens of other people from all over the world that were all waiting to catch a glimpse of the “sea of clouds.”

The sunrise was one of the greatest experience of my life.

Afterwords it was time for us to find our way down from the mountain, which was quite a tedious task. The problem was that we needed to find the “western steps,” and nobody knew where they were or what they were. The language barrier at this point made it quite tough! What was even worse was the fact that we found a sign which pointed to the western steps but in two opposite directions.

Finally, we figured out where to go and followed a small group of Korean guys down the mountain.

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