We flew from Guilin to Ghangzhou, then straight back up north to Zhanjiajie (which I will refer to as ZHJ from now on, so I can type less), via an online ticket I found, which cost us a total of $400 AUD (total). Penny thought it was wrong of me not to tell everyone we were in fact going to make it to Avatar mountain, but we weren’t 100% certain so I didn’t say anything. I also think a little bit of creative misdirection is good for the blog. We had a minor freak-out just before we left Guilin, because every hostel in ZHJ we contacted was booked up but eventually we found one just before we got on the plane, so it looked like it was going to be smooth sailing…
… of course it always LOOKS like it will be smooth sailing. If you happen to own a boat, you probably shouldn’t trust me with it.
We got off the plane in ZHJ and there was snow everywhere… not much, maybe a foot or two, but it was more than I expected. The hostel was ok but the real highlight is the park. The next morning, after some wandering round and map pointing we made it onto the shuttle bus that goes up to the park, and 40 minutes later, we were there. Our hostel receptionist had sold us a very helpful english map which I later dropped off the side of a 200m tall karst mountain, but up until then, it proved quite useful. She’d also suggested an itinerary for us, which I promptly ignored, mainly because it skipped the Souther Pillar of Heaven, which was the inspiration for Avatar, and the thing that made me put China on my travel list years before the movie even came out.
So we set out through the snow (which was a little deeper than we expected) and were surprised almost immediately by a large group of monkeys, chilling out on the road.
Over the two days, we saw lots of them throughout the park and they were cute, but a little skittish. The chinese tourists here are irresponsible and feed them, even though the signs say not to… the ones close to the entrance are quite tame but further in the park they are more wild. Here’s some video we took, deep in the park on our second day, when no one else was around and we just stumbled across two groups of monkeys doing their own thing:
I really can’t describe the scenery here… it’s surreal and amazing in a way I haven’t seen before. The mist created a vibe similar to that of Yangshou and indeed, the geography is similar, but incredibly different at the same time. The Karst mountains near the Li river are more like hills, gently tapering from a wide base up to a point… in ZHJ they are tall… unbelievably tall. They are also thin, and they taper towards the bottom. The photos don’t do them justice… neither to the videos. We both really did feel like we were on another planet.
The visibility made it hard to get the huge epic photos that you can probably google, but we didn’t mind. The mist and complete lack of sun for the whole two days gave the whole thing a mystique that appealed to us both.
But I can’t say the same for the snow, which I usually love. It was deeper than we expected and our shoes got soaked. I mean completely… they were squelching as we walked. Which would have been manageable, if our hostel for the night had any mechanism to dry them. It didn’t… but I’ll get to that after this next bit, which Penny is compelling me to relate.
So we did the Southern Sky Pillar loop and made it all the way to the top. Someone we asked told us it was about 1.5 hours, but it actually took nearly 3 hours. It was steeper than we expected, mainly because by the top you’ve climbed about 900m. At the top, we found out that the only way down was to walk back the way we’d come, or take the 100RMB cable car. We grumbled and took the cablecar, because we knew our hostel was 2-3 hours from the base of the cable car, and we didn’t have time to walk back down (P – also, I was a little bit concerned about walking back down the snow covered stairs, after Josh had fell and slid down half a flight on the way to a viewpoint…).
The cablecar trip was breathtaking and I wish I’d had my camera out… the best I could do was this grainy photo through the perspex. Basically the car drops more than a kilometer over a couple of minutes that seem to fly by, and you really see how tall the karst peaks are. Some of them are hundreds of meters high, but only somewhere between 20m to 50m around (at the base).
We got to the bottom and jumped on a shuttle bus to take us to the park entrance, only to find that there weren’t enough people in the park to keep the shuttle buses running and we had to wait until it filled up. Half an hour later we lucked into a tour group coming down the cable car, who filled the bus and we were off. It was 3:30PM by the time we got to the park entrance and we started the 1.5 hour hike to our hostel.
Which took 3 hours.
It’s painful just to type it, but it was “30 minutes to tina’s” all over again, except our shoes were soaking wet. I’d managed to buy a new map from a small tourist booth, which was completely in chinese, and we kept asking the locals for directions. They kept assuring us we were on the right path and it wasn’t too much further. Our shoes got wetter and wetter, as the sky got darker and darker. For the first hour, we followed the river until we found our turn off. From there, for the next hour, we climbed stairs…. so many stairs that just seemed to go on forever. Penny was convinced she was going to die in the “blizzard” (it was lightly snowing) and I kept assuring her we were nearly there and “my gut feeling is that it’s just over that hill”… she doesn’t trust my gut anymore. (P – I admit that I may not be familiar with the difference between light snow and a blizzard but the whole situation had a “survival movie” feel to it… I felt we were hours away from having to hack our gangrenous toes off with oars).
After 2 hours, we made it to the high road our hostel was supposed to be on and we started walking. And walking… and walking… for another hour. We got there eventually, shoes dripping, clothes covered in snow, just as the last bit of light faded from the sky. The hostel had no heating, and our toilet was frozen.
I asked for a smaller room, with a working heater, but the host spoke no english and I had to draw him a picture to explain.
Once we got the smaller room and a couple of extra quilts, we were slightly warm, but our shoes were still soaked and we had no way to dry them.
With the help of the heater we slept fine and awoke the next morning to continue exploring the park. We put our soaking shoes on and left the hostel to discover it had snowed all night.
There was about 2 foot of snow on the road when we started walking. There were no shuttle buses, because the snow was too heavy. We got to the path we’d decided to trek and I took a few tentative steps down it, but it was under 3-4 feet of snow and we realised we couldn’t go off the main trails at all… the snow was too deep and we just didn’t have the right equipment. We walked down the road for about an hour until we found some other tourists who had hired a minibus to take them back to the main park entrance. They took us with them and we found ourselves at a huge 326M high elevator that took us back down to the low trail (remember, we climbed for an hour straight yesterday to get to the high road).
I was prepared this time, although the trip wasn’t as impressive as the cable car:
After that we walked back down the river via an alternate route and made our way to the park entrance, where we said goodbye to Avatar mountain and hello to the shuttle bus back to the city. We got off the shuttle bus and I had a macgyver moment and took us into a supermarket, where we both bought new shoes… $5 AUD each. We went into the McDonalds next to the supermarket and dried off our feet with some serviettes and tissues, before putting on our fresh new shoes. It was so nice to have clean, dry feet that we celebrated with some Mc Nuggets.
Back at the hostel we borrowed a hair dryer and did our best to dry the shoes, but it was a bit of a lost cause. We got on our plane later that night and flew out to Ghanzgzou. We’d done a lot of research and knew that we were going to be stuck at the airport from our arrival time (midnight) until the metro started running at 7AM. Instead we splurged on the airport hotel, which was less than $50 AUD. The next day we took the airport metro to the train station, then hopped on the train to Hong Kong.
We arrived in Hong Kong, which is infinitely less scummy than China and took a taxi to an area that’s full of hostels. By “hostels” I mean a couple of high rise buildings that are full of scummy little rooms that are completely overpriced. Every recommended place in our lonely planet was full, so we had to ask around a few of the other places… some were way too pricey. Some were cheap, but completely scummy… eventually we found a cheap one we liked. It’s a little small but it’s only for one night:
We leave tomorrow but we might be able to squeeze in one last entry about Hong Kong Before we go, so check back in 24 hours.