Hiking up and down South Peak of Mt. Hua

No, you can not hike up the South peak diretly. If you want to hike all the way, the best route is to leave from Yuquanyuan and hike to North Peak first, and then east peak, south peak, west peak, north peak to hike down. If you want to cover them in one day, I suggest you take a cable car to reach the north peak, or when you reach West peak at last, take a cable car down.

The north railway station is about 4 miles to the Yuquanyuan entrance, you can take a taxi, and the fare would be CNY20.

You can't go directly to South Peak. You can use to the East cable car station to get to the North Peak. From there hike to East, Middle, and then South Peak to finish with West Peak and take the West cable car down. I'm a fast strong hiker too and did the hole loop in 4.5 hours. If short on time you can consider starting backwards at West Peak and go from there directly to South Peak and back to West, avoiding the North to East part, which is the longest (took me 2.5 hrs). From HS north station exit to the square and at the end of that square on the right hand side is a bus kiosk. catch the bus for RMB10 and that takes you to the entrance of the mountain in 10-15 mins (exit at the roundabout with the big boulder) Then from the ticket hall you take a bus either to East Gate (30 mins) or West gate (40 mins) to catch the respective cable cars.