MOST of the 12th was spent on the train to Zhangjiajie. I love the hard seat coach on the sleeper trains. It's a carnival of different people united by the common knowledge and mutual respect for the fact that we have all chosen to be in an unambiguously unpleasant and uncomfortable environment for more hours than is sensible. Your reason for that may be being poor, not being poor but budgeting, or just the fact that you're not going very far, but for the duration of the journey, at least from my perspective, none of these groups judges or looks down on any other. It's a beautiful atmosphere. And in the modern day there's one more factor that unites us all - being addicted to our phones. It's a terrible thing but, paradoxically, in these situations where I'm so clearly an outlier (there's never any other tourists in these coaches, at least not for more than one stop), mindlessly scrolling my phone actually makes me feel a lot closer to my fellow passengers, and by extension to the world in general, because everyone's doing the exact same. If the hard seats were more expensive than the beds I'd pay for them. No that's an abject lie but while they're not I'm not complaining.
Our reason for coming to Zhangjiajie is the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, which you may know as the "floating mountains" landscape which inspired the landscape in the Avatar films (or something - I haven't seen them). We do however have to give credit to a travel blog which J read for the recommendation. If you haven't seen the film and don't know about it from anything else, imagine an overly cinematic image of an inconceivably stunning Chinese landscape. Imagine a poetic, breathtakingly sublime animated landscape - achieved by exaggerating natural features to the point of apparent physical impossibility. This place is what you are imagining. The huge pillars of brown rock genuinely are that high, that impossible looking and that imposing. They do rise hundreds of metres above the canopy of a thick carpet of green forest with no visible ground, which rises to meet them wherever it can, fighting for space with the loose rocks on the tops and the ridges. There are really arches, caves, and both natural and human-made walkways and bridges hundreds of metres up, from which you can't tell whether the canopy far below you is actually the closest to the ground or if there's another drop out of sight and all you can see is the landscape that's in the sky. In the sun (on the first day we were there - the 13th) it gleamed and you could see the dizzying depth and height in full brightness - I strongly recommend taking some of the walking trails that aren't on the main drags between the cable cars, bus stations and elevator - in the late afternoon on the first day we ended up on a rocky platform overlooking a huge and beautiful valley, completely on our own. The second day (the 14th) it rained but that just made it a different kind of magical. Agan, imagine a stunning, exaggerated, green rocky landscape but in the mist, amongst the clouds. That is quite possibly what you imagined to start with as that's the most popular image of this sort of landscape, and once again the real thing does not disappoint. The tops of the pillars rise out of a white void and clouds dance around them. The mist creates layers of mountains that are just dark shapes from afar and then emerge, in exaggerated colours, as you approach. We spent a while walking under the canopy on this day as well, and the forest is equally magnificent - watery green trees and a rushing stream, set against the sinister giants of rock that tower over the canopy and then rise up to frame the sky. I will put as many pictures as I can here but my phone camera can't do it justice really. There will hopefully be some videos on my insta when I have WiFi that both works and allows me to use Instagram.
More practically, the cable cars are very much worth it for the views you get; the lift probably isn't but it is cool. There are loads buses to get around a lot of it that technically of you have to get a pass for (or a ticket that includes it, which we had) but that was only checked once. There is still a fair amount of walking to do to get around, and one of the cable cars you do have to walk through the forest to get to. The unlimited cable car and lift ticket does NOT include entry to the park which we found out the hard way, but the unlimited cable car ticket did come in very useful in allowing us to be more flexible about when we came up and down the mountains (I don't think there's anywhere that they take you that you can't hike, but it would take you a while). As a Brit I was initially a little bit offended at being charged entry to a national park but of course it's perfectly reasonable and not really the same thing at all. I should emphasise that this is a place set up for visitors and the bits you can access are the opposite of "unspoilt" - there are nice paths everywhere that you have to stick to, there's consistent bins and consistent signage (in Chinese, Korean, English, and Russian to my delight) and there's little cafes and outlets everywhere. The less popular walking routes I mentioned are still (mainly) paved pathways with cameras and bins. I did have brief horrific thought about what if they did this to the Lake District but it's not really applicable because the Lake District is much bigger and farmable and livable in. Maybe there are some routes through the mountains separate to the designated tourist areas if you're hardcore, but none of the tourist infrastructure takes away from how absolutely magical it is. Also if you're fine with touristiness but still like to avoid European hotspots, it's worth mentioning that, like in the tourist spots in Kunming and Chongqing, over 90% of the tourists are Chinese and maybe 3% are western.
On the second day in the morning we also went to the secondary scenic area in Wulingyuan, Baofeng Lake. The boat trip around the lake itself is obviously incredibly pretty and there are other boats from which people come out and sing as you pass, and also people standing in boats surrounded by cormorants, which they theatrically lift up on a long stick (I assume they were cormorants, after Swallows and Amazons). I think it's part of a method of fishing. There's a lot more context to all this but it was all explained in Chinese and the transcribing app + Google translate that JB used comically failed to make sense of it. But the people who could understand the guide seemed to thoroughly enjoy it and by the end of the ride (which is only about 15 minutes) everyone was having a fantastic time singing and exclaiming "woowweee" as we had been guided to do.
The best part of the lake area for us though was the hike. At the entrance area you can see a huge sign in red Chinese characters stuck high up on one of the rocks that tower over you, with an arrow pointing straight into the narrow gap between two massive cliff faces. It looks like it would be impossible to get up to but there is the beginning of a narrow staircase hidden in the bushes beneath, with a sign that seems to say that it's the beginning of a 2km hike (spoiler alert it's lying or it's telling you the distance to something else - the hike is about 4.5km). If you walk up stairs relatively fast, the staircase goes up and through the narrow gap for 2 * Teenage Dirtbag + 2 * Love Story + 1 * Gangsta's Paradise (the first played on purpose by J, the second played on purpose by me, the third played because we were genuinely using them to time and it's about the same length and YouTube smart-downloads songs you've never listened to). After that the path opens up a bit and you walk round the rock, with some fantastic views, and through a couple of genuinely creepy tunnels within it, and then you begin the descent down a very steep staircase.
At the bottom of the first staircase you find yourself at a small pagoda in a sheltered little clearing, that is to say a clearing in the massive rocks, sheltered by them rising up to meet each other higher up. The pagoda is weathered but inside a candle is burning, so I presume it's maintained. It's full of, and guarded on the outside by, terrifying wooden statues of warriors, in full colour, and in the centre is what looks like a golden lying Buddha, but interestingly with a sort of scowl, not a serene smile. On his plinth someone had put a couple of packs of biscuits or cakes or something - another sign that it is still visited. At the back is a shrine with a much more calm-looking statue standing up facing you in the dark, still guarded by the terrible warriors, and it's there of course where the candle burns. Further down the next set of steep stairs was another building - this one almost certainly abandoned - the electric cables to it had been cut. There were 4 almost completely empty rooms lined up along the balcony which hung over the drop below. One of the rooms had a bed in it with some mouldy sheets. Finally, after an even steeper set of stairs, we came to a temple complex that looked like it was probably the actually in-use replacement for the buildings higher up. It was still completely empty at the time we were there, but it was clean and safe and decorated with ribbons and lamps that looked like they'd been placed recently. Not long afterwards we came to the end of the stairs and walked the short distance down the shallow artificial waterfall back to the entrance. Coming across those temples and associated buildings was definitely one of the best experiences I've had on this trip. They are along a pretty easy-walking trail which comes off a popular tourist spot, but they themselves are just working or previously-working pagodas up in the hills, not tourist attractions at all.
So Wulingyuan was in general incredibly cool. Even the town itself, while obviously a resort town, is a lovely place to be and a really pretty town. We walked round it for a while on the first night (of the 12th) and we stopped for a while in a paved area by the river where a man and his daughter (presumably) were going around on electric unicycles without handles. It was very cool to watch, and we shared the man's disappointment at not being able to ride all the way up the slope on the side of the stairs up from the river, no matter how many times he tried. The second night in the same place there was a group dance which is a very fun thing about the Asian countries we've been to and we should have more of that in the UK. There's also a magnificent shopping complex around an open air theatre, made to look like an old Chinese town or built within a renovated one. And the supermarket across the road from our hotel was one of the best I've been to in Asia. Goodnight.
