Zhangjiajie

This weekend, Jose, Chris, Andrew Ni, Warren, Cathy and I journeyed south to visit the small city of Zhangjiajie and its famous mountains. Cathy, Chris, Andrew and I took an afternoon flight from Beijing to Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. Known for being the birthplace of Chairman Mao (and not for much else), Changsha was an interesting place, virtually untouched by western tourists.

From our hostel we headed out for a walk just after dark. The streets were alive, as families, rowdy teenagers, and slow-moving seniors shuffled around the warm (82 degree) streets with seemingly no goal except to be out. We saw open-air restaurants full of Mahjong-playing grandparents, their grandchildren playing badminton or soccer nearby. After dinner in a small family-run kitchen, we stood and watched some locals in an intense soccer game on a lighted field nearby. Cathy purchased some sweet mangoes and lychee from a street vendor, and after meeting up with José and Warren, we enjoyed eating fruit and hanging out on the hostel’s warm outdoor patio.

Saturday morning was an early one, as we left the hostel at 7am to catch an 8am bus from Changsha to Zhangjiajie. The bus station was an absolute zoo, and as the only westerners in the place (and the only people wearing shorts) we attracted a good deal of attention.
The bus was hot, the sticky kind of hot where you want nothing more in the world than to change your shirt. We eventually made our way out of dusty Changsha and into the countryside, where I got my first glimpses of the terraced rice paddies, plow-pulling oxen, and stunning landscapes for which southern China is so famous. From the highway I saw dozens of 4-second snapshots, 4-second windows into the lives of the people of rural China. A woman walking through a rice paddy with a large, woven basket strapped to her back, and after a moment a smiling toddler popping his head over the brim; a group of men carrying two baskets each, connected by a thick stick held on their shoulders, walking along the narrow barrier dividing two terraces of a rice paddy; an old woman hand-washing her clothes in a creek behind a small village, surrounded by mountains on three sides. The views were beautiful and interesting beyond description. Driving through the hills of Tuscany is cool… this was cooler.

Zhangjiajie is a small town, cluttered around a river in a small valley. It’s not very pretty, but the central area is filled with shops and restaurants and is in a constant state of activity. Upon arriving around noon on Saturday, we checked into our hostel, which was reached by walking through a sketchy alleyway and then taking a dark elevator to the 4th floor of what appeared to be a dirty office building. The hostel office was located in an attractive lodge-style hut that looked like it had been built on the roof of the office building as an afterthought. The roof/office offered some cool views of the city, and our rooms were spacious and bright, although there were some various sheet-cleanliness-related issues.

We immediately took a cab to the bottom station of the Zhangzhajie Cable Car, the world’s longest. The car departs from the center of the city, exits the valley, traverses a series of rice paddies and small villages, and then ascends 1,279 meters to the top of Tianmen Mountain. It may or may not have been mentioned in this blog that I am pretty afraid of heights (my last cable car experience, at Eisreisenwelt, Austria, ended with me dry heaving in the upper station). Just as I had gotten myself sufficiently pumped up and confident enough to get onto the cable car (pounding my chest and muttering phrases like Man up, Ryan, quit being such a freaking wuss), Warren, our resident Chinese-language expert, informed us that the cable car was closed on account of a French guy attempting to traverse the 7,455 meter, nearly vertical wire on foot. We were shown a poster that was advertising the daring attempt, and the guy looked like a villain from a Disney movie, which made us that much angrier at his idiotic tightrope attempt (think Captain Hook, wearing tight pants and a stupid grin).

Having been forced to call an audible, we took a 45-minute cab ride outside the city to Zhangjiajie National Forest. It’s a tourist attraction that’s starting to garner attention in the west, for one strange reason: the movie Avatar. I haven’t seen it, but apparently the Avatar world features floating, column-like mountains referred to as the Hallelujah Mountains; the artistic renderings in the movie were based on the park in Zhangjiajie. The park itself was incredible, as gigantic columns of red stone, decorated with the occasional tree sprouting out here and there, soared into the low clouds above. The park was full of wild monkeys, and it turned out that when offered a Ritz cracker, they were more than willing to come up and stand next to humans. Only having a few hours of daylight, we hiked up through the mountains to a ridge that offered incredible views of the surrounding range. The first three quarters of the hike wound through a beautiful forest, full of monkeys and exotic-looking birds. The final quarter of the journey weaved through crevasses of red rock, each turn revealing a different view of the remarkably skinny, column-like mountains.

That night we ate at a great local restaurant that was probably too classy for our disgusting, sweaty state. Afterwards, we bought sticks of sugarcane, which we had noticed some locals nibbling on. The sugarcane came in foot-long sticks, and were covered with a hard outer shell that looked like tree bark. The streets were full that night, and locals seemed quite curious to see us buying sugarcane and then being taught how to eat them by the vendor himself. We seemed to create a trend, as a bunch of old people then proceeded to buy sugarcane and eat it while standing next to us. It was a good post-dinner snack, despite Chris making his mouth bleed after biting some rough bark.

Later that night we sang awkward karaoke in a small local bar (they had 12 English songs), and seemed to rid the place of the small number of patrons that had been there before. We also visited a night market that offered all kinds of strange foods. While I stuck to a tasty stir fry-like concoction, we all tried some of Cathy’s stingray and Warren’s oddly prepared eggplant.

Sunday, we had unfinished business to take care of, and headed back to the cable car station. We were happy to learn that the French jerk had failed in his attempt to walk up the rope (he quit after about 100 meters because he got some oil-like substance on his foot. Sucker). The cable car ride was smooth and moved quickly, although it is apparently the world’s longest, at about 48 minutes from bottom to top. The ride became progressively scarier for me as it continued, and by the end, my eyes were glued to the approaching face of the mountain in front of me; I didn’t dare look behind at the ridiculously far-away ground, disappearing into the mist. On top of Tianshen Mountain are a series of pagodas and a large temple, with numerous trails and vistas of the surrounding mountains. The only point where I wussed out on my travel companions was when we approached a portion of the trail that was a half-mile long platform, attached to the side of a several-thousand foot cliff by skinny support rods underneath. I wisely said no thank you and embarked on my own hike inland towards a different part of the mountain. Perhaps Chinese tourists are less intimidated by a westerner when he is by himself, because during the following hour I was addressed and greeted by dozens of Chinese people, and was awkwardly asked to pose for pictures with many. A group or family would be walking the other way on the trail, start giggling and smiling when they saw me, nervously say hello as I passed, and then act surprised and delighted when I’d respond with a boisterous ni hao! A little boy, holding his mother’s hand, confidently waved and said Waiguo ren, ni hao! Foreigner, hello! Naturally, I responded, Zhongguo ren, ni hao! Chinese person, hello! At one point, a little girl shyly walked towards me from the circle of her family, and quietly, slowly, said “Hello…how are you?” I smiled and slowly said, “I’m good, thank you, how are you?” She seemed to ponder her response for a second, and then proudly said, “I’m fine, thank you!” She rushed back and hugged her laughing mother, and I was ashamed that this 4-year old from rural China had just exhibited a better knowledge of English grammar than I had.

After a cheap ramen lunch, we took the cable car down to the middle station. After drying the sweat off my hands and applying some deodorant, we got on a medium-sized bus and ascended ¾ of the way back up to the top, on a road called Heaven Approaching Road. Quite possibly my dad’s worst nightmare, the winding road clung to the side of a series of cliffs, all several thousand feet high and with minimal guardrails. I looked at old pictures on my camera and spoke of nonsensical things with Andrew and Cathy in an effort to distract myself from the ridiculous scenes taking place outside the windows.

After 15 of the longest minutes of my life, we arrived at the destination, the remarkable Tianmen Cave and the Heaven Reaching Ladder. The cave is a literal gap in the massive mountain, a naturally occurring hole that reaches through to the other side. Leading the way up to the cave was a set of alarmingly steep stairs, 999 in all. Had the 999 steps begun at ground level, I probably would have been nervous. Considering that the bottom of the steps was already several thousand feet off the ground below, I was somewhat horrified. I did, however, reach the top, and was amazed at how people like Jose and Warren can be thousands of feet in the air and still want to climb rocks to get higher views. I just don’t get that.

After the harrowing three-part descent that followed (stairs, bus, cable car), we found ourselves back in Zhangjiajie for another dinner of local delicacies. The city streets were once again filled with activity after dark. Our final hours in Zhangjiajie consisted of watching old women do choreographed aerobic dance routines to traditional Chinese songs, attempting to take group pictures with the timer-feature on our cameras, and engaging in a nasty round of bumper cars at an outdoor festival (the fact that the only combatants were six loud Americans attracted a very interested and boisterous crowd that oohed and aahed with each collision).

We survived a tiny local airport that looked and sounded more like a cafeteria in a large high school than any place from which to fly, and after a bumpy 2-hour flight arrived back in Beijing.