Zhangjiajie was our first stop in China after Hong Kong. We thought we were going to a small town but it was actually a city of about 1.5 million. This was still one of the smallest cities we went to in all of China. We arrived there at about 9:30 AM from Hong Kong. We took a night train to Zhangjiajie, and when we got there we went straight to our hotel, via police escort. The police were trying to give us directions but with the language barrier it was hard, they finally just told us to get in a tiny little golf cart and took us there!
As soon as we got there we saw that there was a cable car that went across the city and up to Tianmen mountain. Turns out that the cable car station was basically right across the street from our hotel. We were happy to sit in our room for about 15 minutes because it was very cold in Zhangjiajie, and our rooms were very warm. Since we didn't have a lot of days in this place, we went up to Tianmen mountain right after that.
Tianmen mountain is famous for its glass skywalks and its Stairway to Heaven. Each one was very cool, but I will get to those later. We started off by going up by cable car and what an amazing view we got! Although was a little bit smoggy/foggy (not sure which one or both) we saw a beautiful cherry trees flowering and an amazing road. The amazing road was called the Road of 99 Turns for obvious reasons. It was a very amazing sight.
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| The Road of 99 Turns below (99 is a very lucky number in China) |
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| the view from our cable car |
When we got to top we were very excited to get going , but we couldn't find the way out of the building🤔. When we finally did, we got our first look at snow for the first time in about 2 and a half months. It was only a tiny little bit but it was enough to make Maya jump with joy and enough to make me groan with sorrow. I was not impressed. I was already very cold and was not feeling the snowball fight vibe.
We started walking on the cliff side path that went all around the mountain. When we first walked out on the path all we could see was fog. It was like walking into heaven. As we kept walking, the fog eventually began to clear, and the sun cut through. When we finally saw how high we actually were, we were impressed.
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| Visibility was very low at times |
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| The fog cleared a bit and we could see how high up we really were! |
Once we thought we saw people at the bottom of the cliff, but there was no way to be sure. Finally we got to our first Skywalk. The sky walk was made of glass and only cost the tiniest bit more, so we did it. It's not as scary as it sounds, but it was still very cool. Glass is considered breakable by most people, but I got a whole new meaning of glass after this. The people who made it tested it with sledgehammers before it was opened. After 2 years it cracked, but a new one was installed and now it is 100% safe.
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| Totally safe right? |
There were actually three glass skywalks in the mountain, and since we loved the first one sooo much, we decided to do a second one as well. First though, we went across a huge suspension bridge, saw a weird cave, and a Buddhist temple that was originally built about 1,500 years ago but rebuilt again since then.
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| Buddhist temple at the top of the mountain |
The suspension bridge gave me a whole new understanding of what a suspension bridge is. I thought they were all rickety, swinging in the wind and not very wide. We would see some that are like that in Nepal but in this park it was really solid with cement and was pretty wide.
After that, we kept walking along the cliff side path enjoying the view. We walked through a forest of wishes where people buy red ribbons, write a wish on them, and tie them to a tree. It was a neat experience to walk through that. There must have been like 1000000 ribbons tied on about 150 trees.
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| Forest of red ribbons with wishes written on them for good fortune |
Next we saw a sign that said there was a good place to view a cave in the cliff. We kept seeing those signs so we were excited to finally see it. It turned out to be very small square shaped cave in the side of the cliff, so far away, you could barely see it! Luckily to fill the hole where the experience of seeing a cool cave should have gone we got a snickers bar instead. We totally forgot about the cave after that. We next went down to the temple complex. The walk there was really cool. There was a glass viewing platform that stuck way off the path with no supports. That was scary. There was a sign that said only 5 people at a time, that really scared me, it stuck out about 4 meters from the mountain with no supports going down. Unfortunately the glass was so scratched you couldn't see down underneath.
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| Pretty scary but I did it anyway!! |
We kept going and eventually arrived at the temple. Even though it isn't the original temple (it has been rebuilt) it was pretty cool because it was at the top of the mountain on the edge of a cliff. We saw a chairlift that went up to another temple on the top of the mountain.
We decided to walk on the next glass walkway because we liked the other one so much. This one was called the coiling dragon Skywalk so we were excited. It turned out to be called that because it gives you a great view of the road of 99 turns road. This one had only 1 other family on it so we pretty much had it all to ourselves. This one was also very new so the glass was much nicer than the other one we went on. We met a little boy there about 5 years old who spoke better English than most Chinese people my parents age! He must have got a good education from his parents. While we were up there we heard some loud noises way down on the road, finally we realised it was a blue car screeching around corners. We think they were doing some filming because there were lots of people on the side of he road too. We watched the race car screeching around each corner for about 5 minutes. It was really cool. Finally, we went to a place where we could see the Stairway to Heaven. This is a huge archway of rock (naturally formed) called Heaven's Gate that people have built stairs up to. We were going to go climb the stairs but first we had to get down from above the arch. It turned out that the arch was closed that day, but all the other timing was great. The weather could not have been better for that day. Apparently the day before was gloomy and rainy. On our way down on the cable car, we saw Heaven's Gate but couldn't see the Stairway to Heaven from the cable car.
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| The Stairway to Heaven is the hole in the rock on the top left |
When we got down we went out to explore the town and to find dinner. We were at a restaurant and ordered what we thought was pork. There was no English in the restaurant and so I didn't get what I was hoping for. It was actually pretty gross but I managed to finish most of it. My mom and sister didn't like their dinner either, but my dad got a different thing that we all liked quite a bit. Overall though not a good first impression of Chinese food😬.
The next day we headed out to the country. The attraction there was the huge Zhangjiajie National Forest Park which was created to protect the amazing rock formations that look like tall rock statues standing up in the forest. This park was the first national park in China, and the place where some of the scenery from the movie Avatar was inspired. After getting to our hotel we dropped our bags off, and headed off for the day.
Up the mountain we went up once again in a cable car.
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| Our first good look at the rocks that look like statues |
When we got to the top we went to a place called the natural great wall of China.
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| The amazing natural great wall of China. It really does look like a natural wall! |
It was pretty cool, but the most beautiful was still to come.
Something worth talking about is the crowds. It was International Women's Day and the park was letting all women in for free. So although we saved some money by not having to pay for Maya's and my mom's tickets we realized that we were going to be surrounded by thousands of people all day. We thought it was a good thing at first, but when we saw the throngs of people (about 70% women), we realised it was bad. You literally couldn't walk unless the crowd walked. You couldn't get in front of anybody because the crowd was so dense. The only plus side of this was that if you fell, the crowd completely supported your weight! As we kept walking, we found an amazing peaceful spot with a beautiful view. We stayed there for about 15 minutes before the crowds found us.
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| We found one quiet spot to take photos for a few minutes! |
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I'm on the right filming with my GoPro
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At the beginning of the day we saw a sign that showed a picture of a natural rock bridge called the First Bridge Under the Sun. In China this is considered the first bridge in the world. We thought that we might have already seen it and it didn't seem like much of anything, but when we came out of our quiet, little spot for pictures we realised we had walked across it without even knowing it!
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| First Bridge under the Sun |
We kept walking to a bus stop were we caught a free shuttle over to the most beautiful part of the park. This park is huge and since we only had one day we only saw a tiny little bit of it, but as I said before, it was considered the most beautiful part. All I can say about how it looked was that it was incredibly beautiful. You can see some of how beautiful it is through the pictures.
I'm going to try to describe what the rocks in this park looked like in words. The small part that we saw was probably about 30 kilometres around. The ground was covered in trees and other plants but looked like a giant potato masher pushed most of the ground down leaving different sized rock pillars sticking out of the ground. Now make that about 30 kilometres around and push it down about 100 meters, but the holes on the masher are constantly getting bigger and smaller so some of the pillars are wide at the top and small at the bottom or visa versa, and some pillars are much taller than others. Told you it was hard to describe! What really happened, was that at one point, millions of years ago, this part of China was underwater. The mountain was the sea bottom. as the mountain became a mountain and it rose out of the water, the sandstone eroded away and what was left were pillars of solid stone (sandstone)! As we kept walking the scenery got more and more beautiful, it was easy to see how this inspired Avatar. Eventually we got to a spot that had a metal avatar bird that people could sit on to take photos.
Here are some pictures.
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| Looking down to the bottom of the rock pillar |
There was also a bridge that was a viewing platform of a huge pillar,
It was pretty cool. Finally, when we were done looking at the park, we went to catch the free shuttle back to the cable car. We probably waited in that line for about 1 and a half hours, with about 1000 other people. When a bus came about 25 people would get on from the front of the line, and about 2 minutes later, there was a wave of pushing and shoving that sucked us in. We had no choice but to move forward with the wave. If I lifted up my feet I could have been moved along without any help. We were so cramped that I couldn't even take my backpack off. By the time we got to the front of the line we were pretty rattled. When the gate opened for us to get on the bus, me and my Mom got out but my sister and my dad didn't. The guard had to use all his strength to close the gate because everyone just kept pushing and pushing through, I felt really bad for him. Anyways, when he finally got it closed me and my mom were on the outside and my dad and sister were on the inside, he let us back in though.
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| Sardines anyone? |
Finally we got on the bus that went right past our stop without us noticing. When we did notice, the driver pulled over and flagged down a bus going the opposite direction. We got our own private bus (no-one else was on it) straight to our stop. We then walked back to the cable car, but it was already closed for the night. It was still light out but we were a little worried about making it down off the mountain before dark, since our only option now was to hike down a trail under the cable car. About halfway through we had to turn on the flashlight on my phone because it was pitch black. It took about 1 and a half hours to walk down , and we were starving by the time we got there. Our hotel women made us dinner, which we ate and went straight to bed. The next morning we got up and went back to the city. Here we just explored and relaxed all day. The next morning we woke up and got on a train to Chengdu. We took two trains that lasted from 9:00AM to 10:00PM. We had a few troubles checking in to our hotel, but it all turned out ok. We got into our rooms and went to bed, excited to pick up grandma from the airport the next day.
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