#tianmen mountain

[lionfloss]

Prayer Flags - Tianmen Mountain by Alex Berger

[heresying]

The 99 turns of Tianmen Mountain, China

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Zhangjiajie

I’ve spent the last 4ish days in the rural area of Zhangjiajie, in the mountains of Hunan province in south central China.

I flew in from Beijing on Saturday to Zhangjiajie and then it was an hour drive to the town of Yangjiajie. This town is mainly farmland, lots of roosters crowing, and is very warm and humid. I came here to see Zhangjiajie National Forest, which is famous for its over 3,000 sandstone pillars which are on average about 660 feet tall. They were formed about 350 million years ago due to softer rock around the pillars eroding and falling away. I have truly never seen anything like it, I cannot adequately describe how huge these things were or how amazing it was to see.

The owner of the small hotel I’m staying at, Carol, gave me an extensive run down on how to do a self-guided tour of the park; which I was glad I did instead of doing an official tour. My hotel was only about 300 meters from the park entrance, so I could walk there myself. The park itself despite being very intimidating in its sheer size and the fact that most of it is hundreds of meters in the air, was pretty easy to get around in. There is a system of cable cars to get up the mountain, and a series of buses, bridges, and hiking trails to get around the park from there.

China only very recently opened its borders for the first time in over 3 years, and it is notoriously difficult to get a Chinese visa. While in the bigger cities like Beijing there were definitely more foreigners and expats, and people in general were more used to foreigners, I’ve definitely been noticing a difference in Hunan. I think I have seen less than a dozen foreigners total in the time I’ve been here. I get a lot of stares and kids pointing at me going “哪国人！” （foreigner) I even had a family ask to take my picture with their kid because I was the first foreigner she had seen. Its understandable, not a lot of outsiders have really been traveling through here lately. It is honestly pretty refreshing to travel and be around mainly locals and not the crowd of college aged drunk backpackers that tend to frequent a lot of touristy places around the world.

Don’t get me wrong, people have been so incredibly helpful and accommodating and welcoming the entire time I’ve been here. Every single time I have gotten turned around someone has asked if they could help me. People have been so patient with my broken Chinese. And there is definitely a lot of privilege being a white English speaker that has made getting around a lot easier. I have just definitely been feeling very much like an outsider and it gets a bit wearing to have so many stares every time I do anything and even though its not the same at all it has definitely been very eye opening for what a lot of people experience daily that I haven’t experienced to this extent before.

Anyway. I spent most of Sunday exploring the park. It was really incredible. I just could not comprehend the scale of how big the pillars were. It was quite literally breathtaking and jaw dropping. More than once I stopped dead in my tracks because I just could not believe my eyes. At one point we crossed a natural bridge that had formed between two of the pillars. There were also lots of monkeys and at one point there was a gigantic sculpture to someone in the Communist party with a ton of Communist memorabilia around it, idk what that was all about but it was huge. It was super duper hot and humid but being up high in the mountains helped a lot. Once I got back down to the bottom though I realized I’d gotten sunburned despite it being cloudy. I always forget thats a thing. When I made it back to my hotel I was more sweat than person by that point.

Carol’s mom cooks meals for the hotel, so I ate very well the whole time I was in Zhangjiajie. On Saturday night they were hosting a school group from a nearby university, 20 students, a professor named Jin, and his family. I got to talk with the professor for a while. Apparently he had lived in Germany and Switzerland for over a decade while getting his degrees. He asked me a lot of questions about the US election and he honestly knew more about it than I did. He said people in China pay close attention to this because really the results impact the entire world, which is unfortunately true.

On Monday Carol had again given me extensive instructions for a self guided tour of Tianmen Mountain. This was a bit more complicated. First it involved an hour long car ride to Zhangjiajie, then taking a series of buses to get to the bottom of the mountain and a cable car to get halfway up the mountain. Tianmen Mountain （天门山）translates to Heaven’s Door Mountain. It is called this because of an incredible door like natural arch halfway up the mountain that looks like it is leading to the sky. After taking the cable car halfway up the mountain, I hiked up the famous 999 steps to 天门, Heaven’s Gate. It truly looked like we were climbing stairs directly into the sky.

Once at the top of the staircase, we entered a cave into which was astoundingly built a gigantic escalator which took us up the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. I cannot even imagine how all of this was built.

From there, we were a good 4,500 feet up in the air. I could not comprehend how high up we were. And there was a Burger King and a Bubble Tea restaurant at the top somehow. I had some lunch and them took the long winding path along the cliffside. The path was quite literally hanging off the cliff with a sheer drop of 4,500 feet below. I walked along here for about 3 kilometers, one section of the path was even a glass walk which was honestly terrifying. There were lots of little kids with their families doing the hike as well, and they were absolutely not convinced that the glass was strong enough to hold them, which was completely understandable.

I’ve noticed a lot of people visiting places like this in very fancy clothing, even little kids will wear their best dresses or traditional outfits, because people take a lot of pictures and want to look good in the pictures, even though it is very hot and humid and there is a lot of physical activity.

After hiking I arrived to 天门山死, Tianmenshan Temple. Which, again, was incredible that such a huge temple was built so high up. From there I took something similar to a skilift to take me back to the start of the mountain path, and from there took a cablecar all the way back to town. I was told that this last cablecar was one of the longest cablecars in the world, and it certainly seemed like it. It brought us from 4,500 at the top of the mountain all the way back to the ground in the middle of town 30 minutes later. It was really cool. The line to get in it was pretty intense though. The park tries to limit traffic by only selling 3,000 tickets per hour, which is considered very few tickets given the size of the park, but the problem arises when everyone leaves the park at the same time at the end of the day. This resulted in a very enormous line to get down.

From there I took a shared car to get to my hotel. A lot of people live in very rural areas in the provinces and its tough to make the trek into the city from there so whenever someone drives from the city to town or vice versa they try to fill up the car with people. People generally chip in for gas so its like a rural version of uber without the app. People just roll their window down if they see someone standing on the street or walking down the road and ask if they want a lift.

My window in my room had a gap where it wouldn’t shut all the way so it was letting mosquitoes in. I had managed to block it the last two nights and it wasn’t bad at all but because a rainstorm was incoming there were way more bugs tonight than before. I’m talking thirty to forty mosquitos and other giant bugs I don’t know what they were and don’t really want to know. They’d all gotten through the blocked window and were everywhere which was horrible, so I managed to switch rooms for the rest of my stay.

On Monday it was rainy in the morning and while I could have gone back to Zhangjiajie National Park to see more of it, its an enormous park, I didn’t have it in me and ended up spending the whole day sleeping. My big outing of the day was going with Carol to the grocery store to get snacks. On Tuesday I went to the train station to head to my next stop, Fenghuang, which is also in Hunan province and was only about a 2 hour train ride away.

I’ll update about Fenghuang soon, I’ll be here for about 3 more days.

[kindofamenace]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[travelella]

Tianmen Mountain National Park, Yongding District, Zhangjiajie, China

阳 晨

[carlos-salgado]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[sedusadrakaina]

Hairpin Highway, Tianmen Mountain, China

[lichtrash]

Hairpin Highway, Tianmen Mountain, China

[pumpupblonde]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[sweetnbreezy]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[julieiau]

[lionfloss]

Tianmen Mountain by Alex Berger

[thedorkmark]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[sassy-zorua]

Hairpin Highway, Tianmen Mountain, China

[abcdepiklmno]

Tianmen Mountain, China

[gonnaacetheib]

Tianmen Mountain, China