Yunding Park

This weekend, we didn’t have any work to do. Mark Yang had suggested that we go into a nearby city to check it out, but on Friday I asked him if they had any cool hiking or anything like that nearby. (Putian City has numerous mountains within view)

So Mark made some calls while we were driving around and chattered away in Chinese with one of our other Chinese coworkers, Rita. By the end of the day they had set up a whole plan.

Saturday morning at 6:30am we met MarkY and Rita along with a friend of theirs, the driver of our car. We all piled into this tiny volkswagon and headed off to another part of the city where we found a tour bus that we could follow up into the high remote parts of the mountains. I didn’t realize until later that no one in our car had ever been to this place. Cody and I went into the adventure literally knowing nothing except that we were headed to the mountains.

We had a short drive through the city on back roads and then suddenly we were at the foot of the mountains. We turned onto small roads going up switchbacks and very narrow roads and then back down into valleys. Every time we were near the top of a small mountain, I thought we were near our destination, but we kept crossing over into another valley and another small town.

The tour bus stopped in one of the towns and so we stopped and waited for them to continue, but they were stopped for quite a while, so we got out and walked around the town a little, and Rita went over to talk to the tour leader who informed us that they HAD to stop to call the police. Because someone in the town threw tofu at the bus. I have no idea why you would call the police over this, but it took a good 40 minutes before we were moving again. I was glad for the opportunity to get out of the car and stretch my legs though , and it was quite humorous to see how the whole tofu incident went down. Cody and I decided that this circumstance was the genesis of a new saying. “Tofu on the bus”… which means “making a big deal out of nothing”.

“Why are you so upset? It’s just tofu on the bus!”

We continued on up many more switchbacks, mountains, valleys, farms… until we finally arrived at Yunding Park entrance. We got out of our car and were herded onto a tour bus ourselves where we were shuttled for another half hour up the mountain.

At our first stop we hiked up a short distance, maybe only 10 minutes to Heavenly Lake. It is an ancient extinct volcano where “The pressure from the earth’s crust continuously pushes water up from an underground lake”. The lake is famous for never having dried up even during times of extreme drought because of these unique springs. Around the lake was really pretty meadows and amazing views of the surrounding mountains.

We hung around this area for a while and then were quickly herded off to the next location… which we didn’t even know was part of the trip.

We got back on our bus and were shuttled another half hour to a pretty scenic spot with a little lake and a path down to a dam. When we got to the dam, we realized that this was much more than just a scenic spot and we began descending the mountain through a gorgeous valley with a dozen beautiful waterfalls.

Along the trail there were a bunch of funny signs and silly things. This was a lot of beautiful nature, but somehow they had commercialized it almost to the point of ruining it in my opinion. They turned a huge portion of the valley into a Kayak course, filling the valley bottom with cement to guide the water into little slides. … and there were a lot of very strange sculptures, like a pack of golden monkeys… with no explanation… But the areas that weren’t covered in weirdness were really stunning.

At the bottom of the valley we expected a bus to pick us up and take us back to our car, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that the way back up the mountain was a ski lift/gondola. At the base of this gondola was a really old bridge that connected to a super long staircase that went straight up the mountainside with little switchbacks, but mostly just straight up…. It is a historic site because it was the original main road into the city of Putian from Xiamen. I was shocked to see that this was the “main road” into putian since its virtually impassable with any vehicle or horses… it would be by foot only or maybe a mule...

The gondolas were cool. But half way up, suspended in the sky the car stopped and there was an announcement in chinese. Mark Yang looked scared as he listened and then looked at me and Cody and exclaimed “It’s Broken!!”… Cody and I flipped out for a second in disbelief and then Mark burst in to laughter and said “Only joke!!” and the cars began moving again a few moments later.

This was the end of our journey. We hopped back onto a bus, went back to our car and began our descent back into the city in our tiny cramped car. We didn’t get back into the city until about 7:30pm and had dinner. We went back to the hotel and I collapsed in exhaustion… probably more from the tiny claustrophobic car than from the hiking. Overall, this was the most exciting and interesting thing I’ve done in China.

Thats Cody lookin over one of the highest points in the trail

Mark Yang Contemplating the Mountains. He's tough to take a picture of without him ridgidly posing.

These are the police that came in to deal with our Tofu incident

This was the scenery over much of the mountains. These steps were built at various times. Some were labeled as "Primeval"

Just walkin to town.

Tofu on the bus!

This was an area nearing the bottom of the valley where several streams converged.

The top of the mountain on the meadow.

Mark and Cody enjoying the mountain air after our long car ride.

The Meadow. Very pretty, and also very crowded with people visiting.

parts of this ride were nearly vertical. it was awesome.

I wonder what this little lady thought when i pointed a camera in her face.

These Spiders were everywhere. This one was about the length of my index finger.

hanging out of the car for air.