Huangshan is located in the Anhui Provence (located north east of Shanghai). We traveled there via high speed rail from Shanghai which took about 3 hours.
The high speed rail connection to Huangshan is still relatively new. It’s only been connected this way for five years. Before that you would have needed to take a conventional train which was a 13 hour journey.
The region is well known in China because of the yellow mountains. It’s a spectacularly beautiful area with stark granite peaks and sheer shards of rock jutting straight up into the sky at stunning angles.
Access to the mountains is made easier via a set of cable cars that carry you from up about 1000 meters from the base into the core of the mountains. There are 5 different route up and a series of paved trails connecting them. Also in the mountains are 7 hotels making it easy to come and stay a while. The mountains are notoriously shy and I’m told they are hidden by clouds 200 days of the year! But it’s a sight to behold when the clouds open and reveal their majesty. It’s especially magical to see them shrouded in mist with the steep peaks jutting through.
A visit to the yellow mountains
We went up and stayed at two different hotels for two evenings and then took the cable car back down. The hikes between the hotels and cable cars while paved are quite steep in places. You’re constantly going up and down making the distance less of a challenge than the gain and loss of elevation. One thing that helps is that while the mountains are very steep, they’re not terribly high so there’s plenty of air. I think that they’re only about 1300 meters.
We spent 5 nights total in Huangshan. Along with the yellow mountains we visited three ancient villages. One of which, Hongcun, was made famous by being included in some scenes in Ang Lee’s martial arts epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The three that we visited were similar but very different in terms of how established they were for tourism. Some had many shops amongst the 300 year old buildings but others had almost none.
Chrissy wrote a post detailing our stay at Pig’s Inn which was a quiet special experience. It was more of a bed and breakfast type of experience as the town that it’s in is really a local farming village and not a big tourist destination. Also, the yellow mountains and Huangshan are really not such a popular spot for foreign tourists to visit at all. I only learned about it because of a photo that I stumbled into online. Which led me to asks asking our travel agent if she could work it in. I’m very glad I did because it’s a really amazing place and quite different from Zhangjiajie, which is far more popular for international visitors.
