California College Kids in Shanghai: Back from Avatar-Land

I feel like I keep writing something to this effect over and over again, but it is as true this time as it has been before: last week was one of the most fun I’ve had since arriving.

Here is a quick summary: a few hours after our last class on Friday, my friends Eric, Colby, Vince, and I joined about forty other volunteers for an hour bus ride to a resort-like ICBC bank training facility, which our church and a few others in Shanghai had rented out to hold a youth retreat. We stayed there until early evening on Monday, headed back to our dorm for about a half hour to repack, then set off again for the train station. At a little past nine we rolled out, and the following morning at about nine we arrived at Yellow Mountain (Huangshan) train station; one bus trip and one gondola ride later we found ourselves on the famous, majestic Yellow Mountain, where we stayed pretty much until we returned to Shanghai. It seems like the trip was kind of a collection of experiences so I’ll just sort of write a series of fun/cool/memorable anecdotes. Here is the first!

Last Tuesday at around one in the afternoon, Vince, Colby, and I stepped out of a gondola and into the breathtaking world of Pandora. Ok it wasn’t actually the place where Avatar was filmed, but as we had been told, the scenery here bore a remarkable resemblance to the world created by Avatar director James Cameron. He is actually on record as saying this area, Yellow Mountain, inspired his design of the wilderness of Pandora; upon first site of the rugged, mist-bathed peaks it was easy to tell why.

This place was absolutely unreal. We had seen all kinds of pictures before arriving—and they are quite incredible—but experiencing it within the actual vibrant, majestic columns of rock with all the cool, fresh air and mountain smell was nothing short of ridiculous.

The second day we were there was probably the best; it started at about 4:00 in the morning, where we rose well before the sun to join hundreds and hundreds of our closest Chinese friends to watch the famed Yellow Mountain sunrise. It ended up happening behind some solid cloud cover, unfortunately, but it was still quite a fun experience; in the glow of the dawn, you could watch from our vantage point just a sea of Chinese tourists, all wielding cameras pointing in exactly the same direction. It reminded me of the beginning of a sports match or concert—there was sporadic cheering in response to eccentricities of certain crowd members, and you could feel the anticipation in the air. We also made a couple new friends, including a cool Chinese college kid who actually stuck with us the rest of the day (I’ll write more about him later).

Once it was evident we would not be seeing a magnificent sunrise that day, we made our way to the West Grand Canyon Sea of Clouds (or something like that), where we found some of the coolest, most wild scenery I’ve ever seen. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves: