Steel City Trek Asia: The Side Trek

With us having a week to kill renewing our visa and wanting to be in Hong Kong for the Chinese New year, we decided to do a 3-day mission to other areas in our itinerary. First stop was Hangzhou, which started off in a disaster as it was absolutely pissing it down (first rain we've seen in China though) and we wanted to cycle around. Hangzhou has a huge picturesque lake but also green tea plantations surround the area so we decided to man up and got some girly bikes with baskets on the front. The cycle route went through the countryside villages, a forrest surrounded by plantations and a river running throught the whole valley. It was very green and lush, which was very different to the othet tourist areas in China. We were drenched for our 3hr bus jounrey to Huangshan (Tunxi) for the next stop in our side trek.

Tunxi is at the foot of Huangshan mountain (the yellow mountain) so we decided to climb it the next day to get it out of the way. We started at 6.30am on a bus to the start of the steps and we started our ascend at 8.30am. We climbed up the eastern steps by accident, with the western steps being our primary route to the top but we didn't realise this until we got to the top. We've had good luck on our side when we've climbed up mountains compared to the other travellers but today was not the day, as it was misty all the way up with snow hitting us halfway through. We got to the highest peak that was open and it took us approx 2 hrs to get to the top but there wasn't much to see suprisingly to say we were at the top (At least give us a chocolate bar-tight gets). We went down the western steps, onto a cable car and a bus back to our hostel. This was a planned cable car return as we've not been one on our trip but we chose a bad day for it with it being misty.

Our final trip before heading back to Shanghai was Xidi, which was our first rural village in China. A two bus journey got us there (1.5 hrs) but we was greeted by rain again. It cost us Y40 to walk around a village, to see how the villagers live-thats facking rediculous! We walked around getting lost in this small village and then went to highest viewpoint once we found our way back, and that's when we reailised that the village is a lot bigger than we thought. The rest of the day was spent getting back to Shanghaiw with a combination of 3 buses and 1 train-Lucky us ey!!