The Return of the Brother: ZhangJiaJie

Real

From the film.

ZhangJiaJie or the main event. These few days were the reason and ultimate destination of our trip, everything else was a bonus or close enough that it wouldn't effect our coming here. Many places in China, in my experience have claimed to be the inspiration for various things. I think even YangShuo claimed to be the Avatar Mountains at one point but having been here and seen the movie, I think this one is pretty undeniable, just look at the evidence.

all we needed were the dinosaurs

 We arrived into ZhangJiaJie station and the owner of the hotel we were staying in met us and walked us the 5 minutes to the hotel. Although we found it on hostelworld.com it really was a beautiful hotel complete with the most amazing shower in the world, of course our perspectives could have been altered by our constant need for a decent shower after walking through the park.

The owner, Rocky, had been a tour guide in the park for 20+ years and wasted no time in giving us a fantastic route for our first day in ZhangJiaJie. The park is about a 45 minute drive


from the bus station, which is conveniently next to the train station. Hundreds of buses daily shuttle between the park entrance and the station so it was just a case of flagging one down and  jumping on.

 

heavenly bridge

Every day, we were getting up at 6am with aim of being deep into the belly of the park by the time the crowds really started getting going. again a perfect plan from Rocky but never fun, there was a fair amount of cursing in our room when the alarm was going off, by the fourth day especially.


walking along the river

The park area is huge so our maps and scribbled noted were invaluable. Our first day involved a cable car up to the top of one of the main peak areas, walking the 2 hour and roughly 10km route around the top and then walking down the 3300 steps (according to park information, we didn't count them) to the base of the mountain. The trail around the top was mostly easy to follow, occasionally the signs would give conflicting advice but our map was incredibly accurate. Considering Rocky had drawn and designed it himself before getting them printed to give out, they were flawless. He must have walked the routes hundreds of times to ensure such accuracy and description. The view points around the top were over looking part of the park with names like, Fairy Cave, Visitor from Space, Heavenly pillar and Enchanting rock. Most were fairly well named but some required a serious amount of imagination. The whole upper trail took about 2 hours and by this point we were already completely shattered. The heat was crippling so we were just dripping by the time we can to walking down the steps. We could have taken the cable car back down but Rocky said it was just as quick to walk. at one point the cable car was going directly over head and we were getting some very strange looks from the people in the cars.




monkeys in the background

Once at the bottom it was a further 6km walk along the river to the central point from where we could pick up a bus to the entrance/exit. The river trail began at a point where all the wild monkeys seemed to hang out. there were "please don't feed the monkeys" signs everywhere but of course everyone was causing the monkeys to fight and grab at people. Tom and I stood and watched the chaos for a bit before making our way along further the river. The trail was easy walking and well maintained and zigzagging through the forest it was a nice cool alternative to the exposed top trail. We were pretty much the only foreigners in the park so sometimes we were as much as attraction as the scenery itself. The whole park made me expect to see dinosaurs crashing about in front of as as it looked so much like the scenery from Jurassic Park. It really was beautiful and surprisingly not too crowded, apparently getting up at the crack of dawn was a good idea.
We left the park for home at about 4pm, so nearly 9 hours walking about, completely shattered and in desperate need of a shower (this is maybe why we loved our room so much). We got back to the hotel and handed in some laundry that needed doing. We were a little embarrassed to be handing in what we did and offered to load the machine ourselves, Rocky simply shrugged, ignored the bio hazard signs and bravely volunteered his wife, who I am sure was not so happy, for the job. That pair deserve medals!



the glass elevator

The second day was another 6am job but this time being sore from the day before caused an even greater barrage of  swearing when the alarm went off. This time we had a different route that started with a glass elevator. The second day was much busier and so the park itself seemed to be more stressful an irritating. Scenery wise it was more of the same and having seen it all yesterday, we were getting to know what to expect. One day in the park is not enough whereas two seems to be too much. We were done with the Avatar mountains when we completed our second day. Again back to the hotel and a nice long shower.

Our third day was TianMen Mountain (Heaven's Gate Mountain) which deserves its own post.