The next morning around 7:30 AM we arrived in Huang Shan City, which has about 1.5 million people but is pretty much a stopping point for tourists visiting Huang Shan. After checking into our hostel we boarded a bus that took us an hour out of town and to the famed mountain.
Mountain is probably a misnomer for this place...Huang Shan isn't just one mountain...it's more like a collection of several peaks, cliffs, etc. When you go to Starbucks or bookstores and see those huge picture books of China with surreal looking peaks with clouds swirling around it...that's Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain. Lonely Planet had said to climb the eastern steps because they were easier and to go down the more difficult western steps, but since we only had one day to visit the mountain (most people do it in two), we decided to try to save time and climb the western steps because they have better scenery and more beautiful peaks to climb. 
Looking back at it now, we were idiots...but it paid off, I know that sounds weird. I can't properly describe to you how hard that climb was. Huang Shan is a national park, so the whole way up there were stairs to climb, no beating of your own trail here, but when I say stairs I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of stairs. 
Add in the fact that we had just gotten off a 20 hour train ride, hadn't had a real meal in a day, and the humidity was probably around 90%, and you can see where this is going. Luckily I had brought protein bars and electrolyte powder (thanks, Mom), otherwise I might still be halfway up that mountain. We chose to climb Tian Du Feng, Heavenly City Peak. The Chinese people at the bottom said it would take 4 hours...but we were determined to do it faster. 
It was two and half hours of sweating, to put it simply. I've never done anything as physically demanding as that climb. As we got towards the top the stairs began to go from underneath trees (and Chinese booths trying to sell you everything from water to souvenirs) to cutting through crevices in the mountain; at point I had to wiggle sideways through the rock, the path was so narrow. We always felt like wimps whenever we saw the older Chinese workers climbing up and down the path with a pole across the shoulders, balancing heavy loads of different supplies for the shops along the path. These men were probably around 70 something years old, and here they were, climbing these step steps in sandals balancing huge loads. It was really quite incredible. We'd try to encourage each other and other Chinese climbers we'd see with "Jia you!" (the Chinese cheer for sporting events), and "mei you bu ke neng" (Adidas's slogan, impossible is nothing). 
Anyway, with our T-shirts completely drenched and our shorts getting there too, we finally made it to the top of the peak. It was simply breath-taking: we were on this rock thousands of feet--oops, I mean meters, feet don't exist in China-- in the air with the clouds swirling around us and below, yes, below us. We could some other parts of the mountain, and I wish knew more geological terms to properly describe how they looked, but the pictures will just have to do. 
In simple words, it was like huge jagged rocks coming out of the ground, and we climbed straight up one of them. After admiring the view for a while we climbed to another part of the mountain to get to a cable car that would take us back to the bottom, all the way turning our heads every which way to admire the beauty that was surrounding us. It wasn't one of those "Oh, this is a sweet place, it reminds me of (fill in the blank)," No, none of that. 
These were looks of admiration that made me wonder, how the heck did God create this place, it was really that unique. Even with all the Chinese tourists around (I've noticed that some Chinese women will wear heels no matter what they're doing, even if it's mountain climbing). As we took the cable car down the mountain we were astonished at how high we had climbed in such a little time. 
Amazingly, that one peak was probably just 15% of the whole Huang Shan mountain top; we had to catch a bus to another city the next day though so we didn't have time hike more. If I ever come back to China later in life, I definitely want to see more of Huang Shan. Two bus rides later we arrived at our first Chinese hostel, coated in dry sweat and our muscles super sore. After showering we found a little restaurant and had our first real meal of the trip. Just for future reference, when I say we found a restaurant to eat, don't think of American fine dining...think of a room with tables maybe with clean table clothes, and maybe air conditioning. 
But these kind of places usually had awesome food (as long as you can read the Chinese characters, which most the time we did). Just to give you an idea of what a meal like this costs, we'd usually order 2 or 3 dishes and rice and it would usually come out to about 10 RMB a person; with 1 US dollar= 6.8 RMB that's about a buck and half per person. Awesome, I know. This is one of the reasons that I'm so glad I decided to study abroad in China, and throughout our trip my friends and I would just be blown away at the things we were able to do with the money that we had; it was quite a blessing. Alright, so after we came back from dinner sweaty from the humidity already, we decided that we would always try to make showering the last thing to do right before bed...it was a good lesson to learn at the outset of a trip like this.We settled into our comfy beds and easily fell asleep, exhausted from an awesome first day of traveling.
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