a bit more walking & relaxing at the hot springs

After a good night's rest we have a quick bite to eat and we are off again for a day of walking on the mountains. Today we are planning to walk all the way to the fairy land bridge. I saw some amazing pictures of this bridge on the internet and now it was finally happening, I could see it for real!

We are leaving our backpacks at the reception of the hotel and after our walk to the bridge we come back to pick them up. From there we are going further downhill to the foot of the mountain. This plan sounds great for everyone, especially for me since I find it more pleasant to walk around without something heavy on my back!

Because it's still a bit chilly outside, Tania and I hope to find something warm to drink, but finding a cup of coffee on this mountain, that's clearly a mission impossible. The last few days we saw alot of tourists walking around with a hot cup of Milktea and miraculously, they even sell these drinks in the shops next to our hotel.  It doesn't matter how it tastes, it is hot and in the meantime it warms up my hands. Tania takes one with coffee flavour, I go for the one with the chocolate flavour. It tastes really sweet, not my favourite hot drink in the morning, but it does the job.

And off we go!

After a few minutes of walking our camera's are clicking like mad again, the views are still amazing and we do nothing else but gazing at all this natural beauty. Most of the trail is going downwards, which I like very, very much since I already know that climbing is not my specialty.

We're walking about an hour or so and most of the trail is still going downhill. Me liking this very much!  

For some reason my brother gets suspicious and feels that we are on the wrong track. I wonder how in earth that's possible because when we left our hotel there was only one trail heading for the bridge, there's just no way we were walking in the wrong direction. Or was I wrong???

After taken a couple of stairs downhill (through the turtle cave) we end up at the scenic spot "One hundred ladders". This turns out the be the spot we needed during our hike down the foot of the mountain, so for some reason we DID actually get the wrong trail. The only thing for us to do is go back to the hotel and look for the right one, this is definitely a sign that we aren't very good in reading Chinese maps.

Now that we are in front of it, we decide to go up at the "One Hundred Ladders" and I must say that I didn't count all the steps, but I was sure glad that I made it all the way up. It was really narrow and steep!

As we are almost back at our hotel, we find the right trail to the bridge. Still figuring out how it is possible to have missed this, we went off in the right direction to the fairy land bridge, for the second time in such a short period!

However I must also say that for the first time we were even alone! It was strange, but in the meantime it also felt like heaven. We finally could walk in peace and we only met a handfull of tourists who were going in the same direction as us. Once again, we saw some nice rock formations and pine trees, but the steps were literally killing me. I have never done so many of them in my whole life, but the view of the bridge was worth all the sweat and the inner tears! It was just bloody amazing!

Once we got back at the hotel we went to go get our bags. When we came near the shops it seemed like they put the whole Chinese population on one mountain, I have never seen this before, it was just too crazy for words. You have to see it, to believe it!

As good as it gets, we went on walking further downhill to the foot of the mountain, but this time we hadn't got a chance to see a thing, the only thing you could see was the head of the person in front of you. Unbelievable!

I have never felt claustrophobic, but now was the time to feel that way! At some places you couldn't even walk, you were merely pushed foreward to go with the flow. There was nothing pleasant about this at all, so the only thing I wanted was "to get of the mountain as soon as possible". When I finally reached the others, they were thinking the same thing. After an hour or so we finally reached the Yuping cableway.

Since we weren't in the mood to walk all the way down, we just took the cableway and decided to go to our hotel and have some relax time at the hotsprings. This sounded great to me!

When we checked in at the hotel, we got our tickets to the hotsprings further up the road and after a quick change into our swimmers, we were off.

The hotsprings were fantastic! Our legs were quite sore because of all the walking and the hot tubs were more than welcome. We stayed quite a long time actually, till we got hungry and decided to have something to eat at our hotel.

Although it was a really weird day, I still enjoyed myself pretty much and I wondered what else was going to happen to us on this Asian adventure!