Wulingyuan Scenic Reserve, China (Center on Interactive Map)

This area is a UNESCO listed World Heritage Site, and it was China's first national park. The main attraction is a valley containing surreal rock pillar formations.

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Trips

China Solar Eclipse

7/16/2009: After a fairly brutal overnight ride on the "Soft" Sleeper, we arrived in Changsha at 4:00 in the morning. Little did we know, the train that we were sitting on continued to Zhangjiajie.

Instead, we were deposited in a McDonalds to await a bus transfer four hours later. We ditched the McDonalds for a 24 hour internet center complete with rats and the worst toilet in China.

Some other highlights of Changsha were seeing an 8-foot tall man at the railway station and the most awesome bowl of noodles to ever come out of a package.

We finally caught our bus to Zhangjiajie city, and from then on things were fairly easy. We arrived at the park entrance in the middle afternoon, and took our first hike in the park along with several thousand screaming tourists. Everyone was saying "Hello" to us as we followed a trail along a stream.

That night in the village, we went to the international hotel for dinner where the menu offered dog, frog, river turtle, shark fin soup, snake, and various other tasty delicacies that were not translated into the English menu. Some of the other restaurants in town featured various animals in buckets.

The following day, we woke up early to beat the crowds, and we hiked up to the top of the cable car line using the stairway of only a couple thousand steps. When we reached the top on the mountain, we found a small village packed with thousands of Chinese tourists enjoying a drumming show. Other than that, however, it was not all that crowded. We hiked around the loop trail to check out the viewpoints before hiking down another set of steps where, amazingly, we did not encounter any tourists. Everyone was riding the cable lift! When we got to the bottom, we saw huge crowds waiting for buses and the cable lift.

We decided to spend the night in a nearby area of the park which had a whitewater rafting course. Our trip to that "village" started with a taxi ride to get to the bus stop. During the taxi ride, we were involved in a minor head-on collision which more or less totaled the other car.

Previous Visit (Hong Kong Wetland Park: 7/15/2009)
Next Visit (Baofeng Hu: 7/17/2009)

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Lifelists

Asia
World