A Journey to Mount Huangshan

Mount Huangshan is a place full of cultural heritage and charm. With its stunning and perilous mountain ranges and the best location to view the sunrise, it has become a place that both domestic and foreign tourists yearn for. Below, I will share a detailed account of my journey to Mount Huangshan in 800 words.

Mount Huangshan’s North Gate is connected directly to the town of Tangkou at the foot of the mountain. If you are staying in Dongling, be sure to ask in advance where to get off the bus. It would be embarrassing if you ended up at the South Gate.

Prioritize purchasing tickets through WeChat! (It saves you five yuan and makes it easier to leave early.)

You actually won’t spend a lot of time on Mount Huangshan. If you don’t visit the new scenic area, you can simply connect all the classic attractions in four hours, with the main delay being the cable car waiting time.

Therefore, a day trip is basically feasible, and two days are sufficient to cover all the attractions.

If you don’t want to watch the sunset or sunrise, there is no need to stay on the mountain. The entrance ticket is valid for three days!

If you’re doing a day trip and hiking the entire route, it’s challenging and time-consuming. However, if you get an early start, it’s doable. Choose whether to take the cable car for one leg of the journey based on your own situation.

If you are solely hiking, I recommend climbing the back mountain, which is easier. If you take the cable car up and down the front mountain, you’ll have plenty of time to choose attractions based on your time and preferences.

If you are hiking one way and taking the cable car for the other, you have more time. If you are taking the cable car up the back mountain, remember to purchase your ticket and cable car ticket together (at the cable car ticket office) to save five yuan.

Leaving Mount Huangshan and returning to where I ate on the first day, my colleague mentioned how the food today was better than yesterday’s. I was lost in a daze, thinking that yesterday wasn’t really yesterday. It was only after a harsh reminder that I came back to reality, and I realized I was still sitting in the same spot as yesterday.

Buddhist teachings say that the four elements and five aggregates are all empty. From yesterday’s meal to today’s lunch, the experience in between is the cycle of karma. Regardless of what Buddhism says, when I recall this, I feel a sense of contentment. I had a pleasant time playing, filling this period of karma with scenery, people, and emotions.

This made me think that if distance is the filling of space-time and emotion, then how does the same distance create beauty?

Mount Huangshan didn’t give me the answer. When I reached the peak of Bright Summit, I didn’t see the expected Zhang Wuji, nor did I encounter the siege of martial arts figures. It’s undeniable that I did see two monks descending the mountain. Perhaps the events on Bright Summit had already concluded, and my ascent this time was just a leftover echo. When I arrived at the Welcoming Pine, my heart felt ashen. Beyond hunger and fatigue, I would say that the spectacle was no match for the Huangshan pine trees in the mountains.

Given that those two sights didn’t provide the answer, coupled with the tour guide’s constant chattering.

I arrived at a hasty answer: Distance comes from embracing space-time and witnessing unforeseen emotions; beauty comes from actively accepting these unforeseen emotions that arise after that.

Beauty is born from distance but gains additional emotion. Emotion leads to the non-utilitarian, while most logical forms of expression of facts cannot produce beauty. Beauty only comes from the inexpressible.

From beauty, I thought of fear. It’s a pair of emotional antonyms, yet can be considered synonyms or even unrelated. Fear arises when you encounter mountains, beasts, or unstoppable attacks. It doesn’t even require an attack, just the potential for one is enough to convey its aggression.

Therefore, I speculate that fear comes from comparison, involuntarily comparing things to beautiful things. To me at this point, fear is an extension of beauty, like ugliness that shocks you. However, the beauty of art lies in this: what you consider ugly in one era or by one person, the next era or the next person might consider beautiful. Beauty and ugliness always accompany each other.

Fear is their child.

Psychology often talks about the inner child and inner parent, as well as the concept of self-weakness. A simple delve deeper reveals that psychology has shades of game theory, or perhaps someone who’s mastered game theory finds psychology so easy.

Relationships in psychology are of paramount importance. You could say that a person’s personality unfolds, heals, and forms from this, and the other person is equally important. Without comparison, there is no hurt. The one being compared in fear is the perfect self, while the one doing the comparing is another beauty.

This shows that comparisons often stem from fantasies, and fear can also be seen as a fantasy.

But it doesn’t mean that all fear can be abandoned. It helps you understand whether your perfection meets the standard, what constitutes the standard, and since it’s perfect, why compare?

On the one hand, humans are inherently narcissistic (maintaining oneself helps one to live a peaceful and stable life); on the other hand, through comparison, if one can correctly understand narcissism (releasing it can lead to achievement, controlling it can reduce relationship damage), then by continuing this game, one can achieve unity of mind and body.

Here, narcissism can be simply described as a game. Through the game, I can learn how you react to my reactions, in other words, self-fulfilling prophecy is true! But the key lies in whether you know what your narcissism is narcissistic about.

To get back to the point, fear is the avoidance of the destruction of narcissism, it is also narcissism’s inability to withstand perfection and confront its own imperfection again, unable to conceal it any longer.

Delving deeper, fear will either create a sense of distance or instantly drain the contents of beauty. Upon careful examination, most of our fears stem from a lack of planning.

The journey to Mount Huangshan, a journey of pleasant breezes and gentle sunshine, a journey where breath becomes like a wisp of smoke, a journey where you see a beautiful and flowery you.