Xian Shi, China

This is a day we’ve all been looking forward to and of course one of the reason why some of us choose these types of adventure trips. You see lots of us are thrill seekers junkies! Breakfast at this hotel is like a zoo. You have to fight to get a seat! The bus ride is about 1.5 hours to mount Huashan. It is extremely crowded. We take an 8 person cable car to the top. It’s got to be the strangest cable car I’ve ever taken, more like a rollercoaster in that it goes way up a peak and then it plunges deep into a valley where 20 minutes later you get to the top. Here is the interesting part. This trail had been around for 2000 years . But the modernization of it has only been completed in the last year. Six long years of building went into this project to make it safe to walk to all the peaks via cement paths. There is even a hotel at the top and there’s a lot of building going on. The views are tremendous. The mountains geology is mostly stone and pine trees and it does Snow here in the winter. We started with 21 of us and quickly got dispersed. So our group shrunk to Karyn, Kate, Gilda and I. After summating several peaks, we get to the part where we have to harness ourselves and descends down this narrow crevasse to extremely narrow planks st 6500 feet of altitude. The wait is quite long but we all agree that we’re not missing this experience. There are no Caucasian throughout this whole park, only our group. There are Chinese people from all over China though! I’ll bet in one year from now the wait will be unbeatable. At this point we are six, Jacki and Glen Join us. Now Chinese people try to barge in front of us and we keep blocking them screaming and yelling. It would have been so funny to have a video of this! Finally we arrive at the crucial point. They harness us with this upper body harness and 2 flimsy cables with small clips. We descend this narrow path inside the stone wall made of slanted metal steps while other people share the same path with us going in the opposite direction, that is while clipping and unclipping. Then we get to this narrow exposed wooden plank that you cAn tell us reinforce by metal rebar here and there with absolutely NO railings. So you’d better not unclouded both clips at the same time. Sometime we have to step in indented steps inside the rock, finally we get to a staircase which leads to a small temple with this breathtaking view, we soak it in for a few minutes and decide to go back. Now we’re stuck on the llama for 20 minutes while people go the opposite way crouching underneath our cables and sharing the narrow plank with us ! No fat people allowed here!! What an adrenaline filled experience. Everyone loved it. We took the same tram back and had a real roller coaster ride back down to save a few steps, this day was one where you felt so light hearted like a child! We all wait for the group at the bottom and we found out that Mike proposed to Mary in the temple st the end of the planks . It’s so romantic! Of course she said YES! We ended the day by having a bowl of noodles at 7/11!