Come 4.45 a.m. there was a knock on the door. It was Heidi.

“Come on, get up.”

“Huh?”

“We’re going to see the sun come up.”

“Huh … cloud?”

“No, it’ll be OK. Get dressed.”

“Huh?”

It was early, it was cold, and it was cloudy, so I was not really at my best. We had all heard that seeing the sunrise was one of the “done” things in Huangshan, but that sort of relied on the sky being clear so that you could actually, like, see the sun. Sunrise was due to be 5.03 a.m., and we were there ten minutes before in order to grab a good spot, but given the number of people who were already there, we failed to do this. The time of 5.03 a.m. came along, but it was still misty, and there was little to see. Over the next fifteen minutes the cloud cleared slightly on a couple of occasions, enough to see a little portion of red sky, enough for everyone to coo and gasp; it would seem they had never seen a red sky before. I was underwhelmed.

Later that morning I rose for the second time, in a considerably better mood. We continued our walk around the mountain top, this time to the north side. Thankfully, the weather had cleared since the early morning, and the cloud had burned away, leaving clear views in every direction. As we walked around, our guide Jessica pointed out to us various rocks that had been given names depending on their shapes. There was the alien rock, called this because it stood vertically on the top of the peak with no seeming form of support, and so must have been placed there by aliens; the lion rock, which sat on top of another peak looking out like, well, a lion; woodpecker rock, which looked like a bird with a beak; and the upside-down boot rock, which looked … well, you get the drift.