Taking a Dip in the Huangshan Hot Springs

When we visited Huangshan, China and the Yellow Mountains we were hoping to take the cable car to the top of mountains and avoid the 6km steep steps. However, that didn’t happen due to an army of tourists and their brightly colored umbrellas. Since we weren’t going to wait in line for 3+ hours, we made our way up the endless staircase and gave our muscles a new kind of workout!

The hike up the Yellow Mountains was exhausting and we were feeling it the next day! To soothe our sore muscles (or lack thereof), we spent the next day lounging around in natural hot springs.

The Huangshan Hot Springs have been around for thousand of years, but they have more recently been transformed into a large complex with a wide range of small pools to take a dip in. Hot springs are mineral-rich and offer wide range of health benefits, besides the obvious of relaxing sore muscles. We found ourselves jumping into hot pools that were infused with red wine, green tea, jasmine, coconut milk, rose, ginseng and vitamin c.

Relaxing in some Vitamin C!

As you would expect from us, we spent a lot of our time in the red wine infused hot spring. This hot spring used grapes selected from Bordeaux, France which strengthened the cardiovascular system. It was also designed to look like a giant wooden wine barrel, so we basically were swimming in wine!

More wine!!!!

Depending on what hot spring we sat in, the temperatures ranged from 40-42 degrees Celsius (104 – 108 Fahrenheit). They also have pools with cooler water for when we felt like we were going to pass out from stewing in the hot spring too long.

Now serving Talk Travel To Me soup from Huangshan, China!

There was one cringe-worthy hot spring that was infused with coconut milk. It’s was hard to wrap our heads around sitting in a murky white pool of water, especially when we could see every little thing floating on top…. but for the sake of this blog post we sat in that hot spring for about two minutes before seeing a random hair float pass us.

Besides the coconut milk hot spring, the rest of the pools were very enjoyable. The rose and jasmine hot springs were some of the hottest and had flower petals floating on top of the water. The jasmine hot spring was actually too hot… we might have only got one pinky toe in before jumping out!

The Huangshan Hot Springs entrance fee is around ¥298 (about $45 US) and includes access to the hot springs as well as complimentary showers, towels and lockers to store your belongings.

For anyone making the trek up the Yellow Mountains, the Huangshan Hot Springs are the perfect place to soothe aching muscles and spend the day relaxing… and to sit in a vat of red wine!

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