Up in the sky (Zhangjiajie)

At the end of October, I took a little break and went up into the sky, traveling to Zhangjiajie which is famous for it's bare rock mountain tops. I did a bit of photo research before going as this is supposed to be the place that inspired the scenery for the movie "Avatar". I wanted to go there and see the perfect little skirts of clouds surrounding the bare rock mountain peaks.

Zhangjiajie is in Hunan province, and you can get there by several ways - by flying from Hong Kong we have to fly to Changsha and then take a tour bus to Zhangjiajie stopping at other spots along the way, or you can go by high speed train from Shenzhen (I heard it takes about 7 hours) and the train will stop right at the foot of Zhangjiajie, or there are also local buses that will go from different cities to Zhangjiajie (the time it takes will probably be a lot longer).

The weather throughout the trip was not the best, a bit chilly, rain and lots of fog as well. I can't complain, that's what I wanted before going on the trip, it just gave me a lot of it all at once! :P

This resulted in some photos with nothing to look at, or you have to squint your eyes to tell what's there, it'll test your eyesight for sure.

We flew into Changsha and then had to make our way to Zhangjiajie by bus. It's already a while since the trip, so I can't remember all the places clearly and the ordered that we traveled in. The first location that was really interesting is Phoenix Old Town (Fenghuanggucheng). This town is famous for the night view along the river and the old stilt houses that line the river.

and this is what it looks like at night......

The following day we got closer to Zhangjiajie which is an area made up of clusters of mountain ranges, we will be going up different mountains for the next few days. Unfortunately all the mountains have similar names - tianzishan (heaven's son mountain), tianmenshan (heaven's gate), shangtianti (stairs to heaven)... etc. so it is quite difficult to recall which mountain I took which photos on. :P But if you go to Zhangjiajie, you'll visit all of these too, so don't worry.

On the way, we had to go through many mountain passes, and some of them had super long tunnels - I think one of them is the longest tunnel in the world, and it was pitch black inside. China really likes to save on electricity!

Ascending mountains is a much easier task now for everyone - of course you can still do hikes if you want, but every mountain peak has cable cars running, and one even built an elevator right next to the cliff face. So here are some of the photos from the different mountain peaks.

 above right: luckily I took a photo, so the first mountain we ascended is Tianmenshan (heaven's gate)

below: the train station right by the photo of the mountain - if you come by train from shenzhen it's only 7 hours! And you'll see lots of signs and hear people speaking in Korean, this is a popular tourist spot for Koreans.

 above left: lots of new residential buildings being built - or maybe they are new hotels

 above: If you want to hike or drive down, you'll have to take these roads, who's up for the challenge?

below: a few seconds after the photo above, the fog sudden came and started raining a little, out cable car was like enveloped in whiteness - it actually made it very bright  all around us - did we really go to Heaven? :)

above: on the mountain, we couldn't really take photos of anything, because it just looked like whiteness in the background. I hoped it wasn't going to be like this the whole time we're in Zhangjiajie....

below photos: sometimes it was grey & cloudy, then there would be a short period of sunlight and a slight breeze, then the grey & clouds would be back all too quickly.

The next day we went up another cluster of mountain tops - Yuanjiajie, and it was raining even more, the clouds absolutely covered up everything. We could only see about 2 meters in front of us.

 above left: this monkey scared me! I was taking a photo and then all of a sudden it came into my viewfinder. LOL... the rock behind and the photo below is the "number one bridge of the world".

 above & below: hallelujia mountains that inspired the scene setting for the movie "Avatar" and they even have an Avatar there to take photos with! Looks like a scene from the movie doesn't it?

 below: again, just before we took the outdoor elevator to descend from the mountain top, the sky cleared a little so that we can see a bit further. Some of the photos really are like the Chinese paintings of mountain scenes where there are ribbons of cloud/fog weaving around the mountains.

above: photo of the outdoor elevator

Then we visited one of the local minorities - tusi tribe. Quite interesting architecture.

 above: this pagoda is 9 levels tall and there's not a single nail used to hold the wood in place

Then we visited the art gallery of a local artist - Lee Jun Sheng, he creates artworks with his wife using natural material - can be stones, wood chips, sand, anything! It's pretty cool what they've done.

On our last day, we visited a national park to see the mountain tops from the ground. It's a bit different, and you won't get the interlacing of the mountain and clouds. But the national park has loads of hiking trails to explore! The trees are super tall and it feels so good to be a place that has so much green!

 and if you get tired from too much walking, you can enjoy this...

At first, when I was there, I thought I wouldn't get any good photos due to the weather, but when I got home and looked through the photos, some of them were ok, at least you can still kind of make out the shadow of the karst mountains. It was a good trip - nice to see it at least once in a lifetime.