So our last destination in the Xian area was Huashan (华山）which is widely known as the most dangerous hiking trail in China. It's about two hours drive away from the city of Xian. The popular thing to do is to get there around midnight, then hike through the night so you can reach the peak in time for the sunrise, so it’s about a five hour hike. Since this is what the ballers do, we decided that we were ballers as well. So we took off from the station around 8:30, got to the mountain around 10:30 and started hiking around 11pm.One thing we noticed about China was that there are little vendor stands everywhere. You would think that on this crazy mountain they wouldn’t bother building little shops and lugging stuff the mountain. However…
The hike was not nearly as dangerous as people here make it out to be. “It’s very dangerous!” 非常险！！they would constantly tell us. But when we arrived and started hiking, we noticed that there were hand rails accompanying every steep part of the trail, and the entire trail was comprised of stairs. So in fact it would be very hard to slip and fall.
However, difficulty was another category altogether. This was probably the most arduous hike I’ve ever gone on. It felt like a hike that was twice as long as Nevada falls, but instead of all the switch-backs it’s as if the park staff decided to build a trail straight up the side of the mountain with stairs. Some parts were basically like climbing a stone ladder.
Roundtrip was basically a 13-hour hike with some breaks in between. At the top the views were beautiful though. Here is the sunrise we saw at 5:00 AM
Some parts of these mountains looked like El Capitan’s Chinese cousin.
Notice that little line up the mountain, those are stairs
The scenery was nice
No explanation necessary.
It was an awesome trip but by the end we felt like our knees and joints were all about to give way. We were sad to leave Xian and say goodbye to George and all of our friends we met there. Now we’re off to Shanghai where much awaits us.
3 comments:
I didn't know about your blog until seeing the link from Jasper's blog... Sorry about being so curious but I always wonder how it would be like to travel in China. Your videos and Jasper's photos give me a good perspective. The ladder-like stairs with the metal chains look hard-core...
Looks like your Chinese is getting good with all the Chinese names of places you been to! Dangerous is 危險 though, or do they only say 險 in Beijing? It's funny how Jasper says da jia hao in almost every single post...
Hey John!
Looks and sounds like you guys had a good hike up 华山. I've heard somewhere that old people that live around the mountains go hiking daily up the mountain as their morning exercise...is that true? haha.
Take more pictures and bring back more stories!
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