Got up early, though not as early as planned, for our day trip to the sacred Taoist mountain of Hua Shan. We expected it to take around 2.5 hours to get there, but between lousy connections and the bus taking 3 hours instead of 2 (there was construction), we didn't get onto the mountain until 1pm after an 8am departure! This made for a pretty short day there, given that we thought buses would stop running back to Xi'an around 5:30pm. It was also exceedingly expensive at 100 RMB each to get in and another 150 RMB each for the gondola up the mountain on top of 20 RMB each way for the shuttle up the private road from the entrance to the gondola (around $42 each). And that's not counting food (we brought a picnic), or transit from Xi'an. I don't think National Parks in the US cost that much!
However, it was totally worth it.
As we were disembarking from our bus and looking for a taxi to the mountain, we met Kasper and Ciska from Belgium, who had been on the bus with us and we'd seen going to and from the Terra Cotta Army site on the same buses with us yesterday! We ended up spending the day exploring the mountain together. It's been ages since we've spent a day sightseeing with other Westerners and we really enjoyed the English-speaking company.
The scenery was spectacular, with impossibly steep cliffs and otherworldly rock formations. Also some amusing signs: “no walking while watching, no watching while walking”, “no striding”, and “from this descends the mountain” were my favorites. At some point when I have a decent internet connection and don't have a million other things to do with it, I'll need to research the geology of the mountain, but we speculate that it is made up of sedimentary rock turned on end, as we learned about at the Hong Kong History Museum. Certainly, that's what it looks like!
Upon getting back to Xi'an (buses do run after 5:30pm, but we waited over an hour for our bus which finally left at 6:50pm), we went back to First Noodle Under The Sun, where we had some great spinach noodles and some chicken that wasn't too bad aside from the rather unappetizing inclusion of parts of the chicken us Americans don't normally eat!
There are more photos in the gallery.
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