I am not Rocky!!!

One of my friends asked if I would be singing the Rocky theme as I was climbing all those stairs up the mountain. While I spent most of the time being too tired to sing songs in my head, I did keep thinking about that comment. So when I got to where I thought I was at the top of the mountain, I looked at the platform on the peak where the cable car was dropping people off and they were all looking out from the platform at the few people climbing the mountains and taking pictures of the views. I then looked at the last set of stairs and thought, this is my Rocky moment. So the theme song started playing in my head, I took a few deep breaths and decided to sprint up the last set of stairs. There were probably about 70-80 stairs, so not the easiest sprint, but I knew I could do it. I reached the top of the staircase and was getting ready to raise my arms when I noticed there were still 2 other sets of stairs leading up to the final platform each of which were about 70-80 steps long. So I stood on the short flat area that I sprinted up to with people above me all looking at me as if I was crazy for sprinting up a set of stairs that don't lead anywhere. I was out of breath feeling like I could hardly move and I still had to shamelessly walk up the real final set of stairs. When I got to the top, tour groups and other people were still staring at me as if I was an idiot for sprinting up to no where and well I was an idiot, so they were justified in giving me the crazy stares. Oh well, I made it to the top, maybe it wasn't in the best fashion, but I can still say that I climbed up to the top of it.

Huangshan Part2

After about 7 hours in total of going up and down stairs, climbing up the mountain and exploring the peaks, my legs were yelling for mercy so I headed to my hotel at the peak of the mountain to sleep. The hotel had a nice room, but it was absolutely freezing in the room. The top of the mountain was about-10 degrees Celsius which is about 14F and my room felt like it was somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees, so needless to say it was cold. I took both thick blankets from the two beds in the room to cover me up and slept in as many clothes as I could. After being under the covers my body heat was helping to warm up the bed so I finally got comfortable enough to go to sleep.

The next morning I headed out for my journey down the mountain. I knew it wasn't going to be easy when I walked down 2 steps in the front of my hotel and my legs were in pain. 2 steps down about a couple thousand more to go. I went back up to explore the peaks some more and then began to head down the West Side steps of the Mountain. The west side was neat (the part of it I saw) and after passing the cable car, I went back to the cable car to take it down the west side as I didn't think I could make it down the whole west side of steps in one piece. I don't think I have many fears, but I think cable cars going down the sides of mountains may be one of my fears. It was a little scary when you leave the cable car station and it feels like there is nothing around you except the cable holding you up. I am totally fine with ski lifts, but for some reason with the wind rocking my car around and there just being a feeling like if something goes wrong, I'm a goner. So it wasn't the most pleasant cable car ride, but I was happy when we arrived at the station at the bottom of the mountain.

I was supposed to have a driver waiting for me at the bottom that was going to be taking me around to the small towns around the mountain area, but the guy never showed up and didn't answer his phone when I tried to call him. I wasn't mad because the mountain was really all I needed to see on the trip and it really could be all that I needed to see for a whole year of trips. So I just retraced my steps to get back to Tunxi in order to catch my flight. Needless to say, my legs were hurting, I was exhausted, but it was a GREAT GREAT trip.

Huangshan Part1

While I was looking forward to both the Bahamas and Xian, I was really looking forward to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain). I can sum up Huangshan in one word…WOW. It was all that I thought it would be and one of the best trips I have ever done in my life. The mountain does not disappoint.

I knew that there was not going to be much touristy stuff to do in Huangshan, it was all about climbing up the mountain. Before getting too deep, when I say climbing, I didn't have any climbing gear, it is not climbing like rock climbing; you see China knew it was an important mountain so they built stares out of the rock of the mountain going all the way up to the top. While this may sound like it isn't really mountain climbing, I can say that going up stairs for 4 hours is not the easiest thing to do.

I began my day with having a guy take me on the back of his bike to the bus/train station in the town of Tunxi (the town that I flew into). I then hopped on a very local mini bus after they said they were going to Huangshan. I was a little hesitant, but the tour books noted that small buses left the town routinely to go to Huangshan, so I was confident that it would take me to the mountain. The area in between Tunxi and the mountain was full of farms and it was a cool little trip. Along the way, we would stop when people would wave us down and they would hop onto the bus to go to the mountain, most of the people were hopping on with stuff to sell at the mountain as they were not going to climb the mountain. The bus took me into the small town at the base of the mountain and after a little explaining the mini bus eventually dropped me off at another bus station, this bus was going to take me up to the starting point of the mountain.

So there I was at the starting point and I had the choice of taking a cable car or walking up and, of course, I was there to climb it, so I started my journey up. From the bottom the mountain looked pretty cool and it was a great day no clouds in the sky. I was actually mistakenly taken to the wrong set of steps, there is an East Side and a West Side, I was taken to the East side steps. From what I understood it was shorter then the west side, so I was a little disappointed, but oh well as long I got to the top. In the end I was very happy to have gone up the East Side, while there were less "attractions" to see on the way up, the views were still absolutely amazing. There is a pretty funny story about my reaching the top of the mountain, if you want to see it, click here to jump to the blog post. After my journey to the top of the mountain, I then spent the next couple of hours exploring the peak of the mountain (note that the mountain actually has 72 peaks so you kind of just go around to different areas exploring). It was actually really good that I went up the shorter set of stairs because it gave me a lot more time to explore the peaks of the mountain and take great pictures from the top. I would actually recommend this for those people that only have a limited time (note there are also cable cars that take you to the top in a couple of minutes and then you can explore the peak much more easily, but that is not the funnest way to explore the mountain). Again, the views and the scenes from the top were stunning, the mountain itself is a really cool mountain but around every corner I just kept saying to myself…"This is awesome."

Xian

After spending exactly 2 days in Shanghai, I headed off to a city that would be unknown by people other then the fact that some farmer had discovered a large collection of terracotta statues. Xian is a pretty desolate town that appears to survive primarily from the tourist industry that goes to this city as a base to adventure out about 1 hour into the countryside to look at the grand display of Terracotta Soldiers. I ended up going on this adventure with a couple of my friends and we started the first morning out with driving to see the terracotta soldiers. For those of you who are not aware of these statues, when you do a 10 day tour of China, the typical tour includes stops in Beijing (for all the history that it offers), Shanghai (for it just being the modern hub of China), and then they typically hit Xian because of the famous terracotta warriors (you will note that I think in just these couple of sentences I have typed the word "terracotta" more times then I have ever done in my life). So my main reason was to see what the hype was about with the soldiers and I can truly say that it was worth the trip out. We started with the smallest display of soldiers and went to the largest, with the largest being truly amazing. I am not a huge museum person, I would much rather climb a mountain (oh yeah there will be a post about that adventure), but for a display, this was worth it. Just look a the pictures and you will get an idea of what it was all about.

We then went to see the Wild (sometimes called Big) Goose Pagoda and then headed over to the Ming Wall that surrounds Xian. Both were neat, but nothing that I would go out of my way to look at. You could climb up to the top of the wall and walk around on the top. We walked around ¼ of the wall and it took about 40-50 minutes to do this, so that should give you some perspective on how big the wall is around the city.

We ended our day with, in my opinion, the highlight of the trip and it wasn't even a place that we were planning on going. It just so happens that the hotel we were staying at was right next to the Old Muslim Street. So our driver dropped us off at the beginning of the street and we began to walk down it. This is the kind of thing that I like, you had food vendors all up and down (and in the middle of) the street cooking all kinds of different foods. People were hawking all kinds of little things here and there. I can find food streets in Shanghai and I can definitely find people hawking things in Shanghai, but the atmosphere of this street just felt different, mostly because of the heavy Muslim influence.

Raining on our parade

As promised, here are the pictures as I saw it.

Wedding Before the Rain:

I turned to my left and noticed that the rain was coming:

About 5 Minutes Later, everyone under the gazebo a little wet:

The Bahamas

So as I said in my last post, a part of my long almost 18,000 mile journey took me to the Bahamas. This was my first time to the Bahamas and I have to say that it was quite enjoyable. We stayed at the Sheraton Cable Beach about 15 minutes from the Nassau airport. I had read a bunch of complaints about the hotel, but I actually thought it was not too bad. The beach was nice and the facilities were not so bad. The whole point in my family and I going all the way from Shanghai to the Bahamas was to attend my younger sister's wedding. The wedding ceremony was set out on the beach and it was going great until right before the ceremony was wrapped up it started to rain (actually I decided to do a post of the 3 pictures that define the moments before and after the rain hit, so click here to see that post). We all started to joke that we had heard of the bride and/or groom running away because of cold feet, but had never heard of everyone at the wedding running away. The scene was great because it started to drizzle a little bit, but at one point I looked out and noticed that there was a whole bunch of rain coming our way. Once the rain really started to fall everyone got up out of their seats and made a mad dash for the gazebo where the wedding reception was going to take place, this was before the wedding ceremony had concluded with the, "I do's" and the "I now pronounce you husband and wife." I'm sure it was not the way that my sister envisioned it, but at least it will be a memorable story.

I didn't have much time in the Bahamas, but, besides all the swimming that we did, I did get to go out and do a short snorkelling trip. The snorkelling was just okay, but before going back to the beach the "captain" of the boat said that we could look for conch shells. So he tied a rope to the back of his boat and three of us grabbed onto the rope and he basically just towed us back of his boat as we looked at the bottom of the ocean for conch shells (the water was bout 12 feet deep so we were towed on the surface looking down). After about 10 minutes we started to find the shells and I gave mine to my younger sister and her new husband, so all in all, it was a good (but short) trip.