Day 3 — Tianmen Mountain ...

One-day mountain pass: 240RMB/1175NT/CAN$43 (guesthouse discount)

Out of the hotel around 7am to find the sun shining and the skies blue. The weather couldn't have been more perfect! The owners of our guesthouse weren't up at this early hour but their twelve-year-old daughter was and insisted on walking us over toward the cable car station.

Food stall #3 sold yummy Youtiao at 2RMB/10NT/CAN$0.36 each. This was breakfast, along with some fruit from one of the local markets.

Tianmen Mountain is absolutely stunning! I can't even begin to put it into words nor do I feel the images in the album on the sidebar (see right) do the place any justice. If there is one place to add to your bucket list, this is most definitely it.

The cable car ride up is said to be the 'longest passenger cableway of high mountains in the world.' The cableway is 7,455 meters, has an ascent of 1,279 meters and the highest gradient is 37 degrees. Once on the mountain, one can spend hours and hours and hours checking out the sights. We covered all the trails shown on the map here.

Things of note:

Leaving at 7am in the morning means one only has to wait about a half hour to get into a cable car. A guest at the hotel said he went around 10am and was stuck in line for two and a half hours.

It's an extra 5RMB to walk across the see through platform. It wasn't terribly exciting due to the mass amounts of people on it.

There is a ski lift up on the mountain to save some walking time. It's 25RMB/one-way. We took the lift but realized we missed a lot of the sites, so we hiked back and forth.

While being in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to, it was quite strange that tons of people were pointing and repeatedly saying 外國人 (wàiguórén) meaning foreigner. Words cannot even describe the surrounding beauty and yet we seemed to be the spectacle. Really? After awhile, my travel partner and I started calling back 中國人 (zhōngguórén) meaning Chinese person. It seemed most appropriate and caused the finger pointing to stop in most cases, but not all.

Bathrooms are terribly stinky all over china and most are, of course, without tissues. Line-ups don't exist, especially in the bathroom. People push past and if the bathroom has no door, no problem. Women and children drop their pants and crouch right in front of you. Thanks for sharing!

Tiny local restaurant #2 was a restaurant on the corner of the alley of where we were staying. We had been gone eight hours and barely had anything to eat. The server gave us an English menu, which means higher prices according to my travel partner, Tom, who ordered and paid for dinner. The food was quite delicious with the exception of the intestines that had been ordered by accident. Eeek.

Image: Charles Liu @ the nanfang

What I found interesting and what I later learned happens all over China is that every restaurant you go to gives you set dishes wrapped in plastic, like this image here. This is done to show that the dishes have been sterilized. If restaurants are doing this all over China (every place I went to for two weeks was) think of the amounts of plastic being used for this alone.

Most local restaurants will give you hot tea and a plastic bucket upon your arrival. One would think the tea was for drinking but this isn't the case. After you remove the plastic from your place setting, you are to rinse the items with the hot tea and then discard the tea into the plastic bowl. This way you know your dishes are clean. Interesting.

After filling our faces with delicious food and some cold beers, it was time to take a rest and get to bed early as the next day would prove to be another big one!