Zhangjiajie

How do you attempt to get to a place you can’t pronouce! By pointing at a guide book and hoping that the person behind the window can read! That’s not meant to sound mean its just that most Chinese can only read Chinese script so us pointing to the English form of the name means nothing!! So after 10 minutes of some bad pronounciation and a bit of point at the book the ticket clerk finally say ‘Ooohhhh Zhangjiajie! Why didn’t you say so in the first place!?’ Well, I guess that’s what he said, quickly followed by ‘Why do I always get the idiot foreigners in my queue!’. So we jumped on the bus leaving Fenghuang behind and headed 4 hours north to the non-descript city of Zhangjiajie. The following morning, loaded up with rain clothes and a change of underwear, we headed to the nearby national park, a place that we’d read about online and that looked pretty cool. Catching a small local bus out to the park you’d have thought that perhaps it was a quiet place where not many tourists visit…but get to the entrance and instantly you are reminded that this is China and everywhere is heaving with people! Coach loads of tourist pouring through the entrance in a never ending stream! If 10 million Chinese are on a train at any one time (random fact!) and there must be 30 million out sightseeing at any one time then its a good job there’s over a billion people in this country in total otherwise who’d make all those Nike trainers and Primark clothes we know and love! Anyway, I digress, Zhangjiajie – where to start describing?? Unbeknown to us it just so happens that the landscape of this national park was used in this year’s biggest film (is it the biggest ever, not sure?!?) ‘Avatar’. So for those who have seen the film imagine all those floating islands but instead of floating they are pillars of rock randomly coming out of the ground shrouded in cloud and covered in vegetation…I say coming out of the ground but I’m guessing that at some point in time the ground actually opened up leaving these impressive pillars standing. Its an amazing place, totally surreal and other worldly. We trekked along the base of the pillars for a couple of hours following a stream and the mega phone wielding tour leaders before opting to climb up to the top via a set of neverending steps! Seemed to get a lot quieter all of a sudden, funny that! At the top you get the most amazing views out across this weird landscape – the ground just falls away in front of you, 700m tall pillars pop up in to the air, some no more than 20m wide. Its green and lush (we found out why the following day!) vegetation clinging to the sides. Its a huge park so there are buses and cable cars connecting certain parts of the park, all with strange named formations to see, there is even an elevator built on to the side of one the rock faces!! Perched on top of the pillar the elevator descends into the depths of the park below, through cloud, rain and with a stunning view out across the park, its all totally mad and very Chinese! Come next year I expect there to be flying dragons and avatars in one section of the park! We spent the night in the park in a little YHA place (the only people staying there, little creepy!) hoping to spend another day exploring the park but we awoke to rain and going by the size of the puddles it had been coming down for sometime… and showed no sign of stopping. We braved the weather and tried a couple of the nearby scenic spots hoping that with the cloud comes those dramatic landscape shots of misty peaks and floating islands but instead you could see nothing but cloud and lots of Chinese people in yellow poncho’s. Its an amazing place and I’m guessing because of the film it is now going to get more popular so it was nice to see it when it was ‘quiet’ – in Chinese terms! Who am I kidding this wasn’t quiet, there was just no other foreigners around! We got asked by a couple of people what tour we were with and they were very shocked when we said that we were just there on our own. I’m sure in the next edition of the bible (lonely planet) this will undoubtly get more than the one paragraph it gets now!