There was tomb-sweeping festival and then my students had exams, so lucky Saskia got 5 days off from teaching! First I made my way down to Zhuzhou to visit a friend and from there I took a bus and taxi to Wulingyuan, the town situated at an entrance of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. It's a pretty big park and is famous for inspiring David Cameron to create the floating mountains in his movie Avatar. There's lots more on the internet you can google for yourself. I woke up early the first day and headed into the park. It was a full day... I have learned that when traveling alone I tend to feel so anxious of missing out on something that I walk everywhere at a pretty fast pace and walking around this forest includes a LOT of stairs and there are many paths to go along. I was lucky to be there during non-touristy days- of course, this being China, there were still more people there than I would've liked, but I was very lucky in not having to wait in any sort of lines and being able to simply hop on buses, cablecars and elevators without much hassle. The trails were also not crowded which made the whole experience so much more enjoyable, because I just know if these trails had been full of people (which I am 100% positive they are during high-tourist season) I would've been boiling over with anger constantly. However, this first day of walking around my anxiety for FOMO (fear of missing out) and my feeling of absolute loneliness lead me to sit maybe a total of 10 minutes between 7:30am to 9pm. Finally, I collapsed on my bed and woke up the next day with possibly most probably the sorest legs I have ever had in my life.
While uploading these pics they got all mixed up so they are not chronologically in order and I don't have the patience/internet connection to fix the order, so you'll just have to deal with it- it doesn't really matter. Also, sorry for a lot of repeated mountain pictures. They're just so cool and I can't decide which ones to delete so this blog is just getting the whole lot of them. Also also, 99.9% of these pictures would've been so much better with a better camera... most of these are a bit blurry and my camera seems to be slowly dying. So, just imagine these pictures being taken with a super good camera and be impressed by all the beauty I saw.
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| BRIGHT orange mushrooms? |
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| I think these two were called something like "two lovers meeting from afar" or something like that. |
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| Golden Whip Stream |
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| What a qofe |
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| Here you can see all the great names of peaks and places |
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| He looks like a man! |
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| Unmarked steps I probably wasn't supposed to go down but did anyway and it was empty and quiet and great |
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| Two pillars meeting |
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| Cablecar through the fog... so cool. I didn't get the famous view, but honestly this was pretty amazing, too. |
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| I spy with my little eye... |
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| Monkeys! |
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| So many steps... |
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| Yeah... getting equipment up these mountains is a huge ordeal. Seeing some of the workers having to drag up wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of cement mixture was impressive. |
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| Hahaha this dude cracks me up |
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| Just eatin' his apple |
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| Peaks on peaks on peaks |
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| I like him. I don't know who he is but I like him. |
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| Wulingyuan (the town I stayed in). The whole town has been turned into a tourist town and has been completely built up- it's pretty amazing to see all of the new, beautiful buildings actually being used. I walked around most of the town and saw only one old, concrete building. Most of the town has been built in different styles of traditional Chinese architecture and its absolutely beautiful. Go Wulingyuan!!! |
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| It's also just in a stunning setting. |
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