What kind of idiot takes a twenty-two hour train alone into the middle of a country that speaks a language that they absolutely have no understanding of to see some mountains in the middle of nowhere?
This kind of idiot.
Day 1
I was on the train until 5:20pm the day after leaving Shanghai. There was absolutely no English on the train or on the platforms where it stopped so I just tried to stay really alert about where we were even a few hours before my stop in case it was ahead of schedule. I also made sure that I knew what the Chinese characters for my stop looked like so that I would be able to recognize them and jump off quickly. The Google translate app is a gift. I downloaded the Chinese translator and could scan things as if you’re going to take a photo and it translates in real time. It’s definitely not always 100% accurate, but it does well enough to give a general idea of what is going on.
So, before I left for China, I had heard about the dreaded Chinese public toilets that are basically just a hole in the ground. I had also been warned to bring my own tissue because odds are toilet paper will not be supplied. This is pretty accurate, but no big deal. I would compare it to camping, which I don’t mind, but worse because so many people use the same place instead of it being your own little patch in the woods. Still totally manageable though. By far my worst Chinese toilet experience was on these trains. The toilets are still just holes and theres still no tp, but it’s on a moving train. Lots of jostling.
When I finally got to the city of Zhangjiajie, it took another hour by cab to get to the hotel I had booked. At this point I was glad that I had picked this one based off of the comment online that said that it was a fifteen minute walk from the entrance to the national park, because it would have been really difficult to get to the park and back from the city center. Once the cab pulled up to the hotel and I went inside, I realized that I accidentally booked a five star hotel. One may think “how the heck do you accidentally book a five star hotel?” And my answer to that is that it was only $70 per night. I chose to stay there over a hostel because it was my first solo trip and I wanted to feel a little more secure and because my lovely friend Drew (see him featured in my Camping in Norway post) had been to Zhangjiajie before and told me that the hostel he stayed in was not good at all. So thank you, Drew, for making me accidentally stay in a hotel with amazing buffets and a claw foot tub in my room.
Day 2
I woke up pretty early the next morning and walked to the park. People in China do not queue up for anything. I was cut in line to get my tickets a few times and when I tried to tell a woman that I was not okay with that the cashier refused to sell me a ticket so I had to go to a different window. I understand that culturally here people tend to group up more than line up, but I don’t get how I can be the only person at the window and about to buy my ticket and people slip in front of me every time.
Drew had told me to take the hike to the top, because it apparently is less touristy and really beautiful, but unlike him I cannot read Mandarin. Therefore I accidentally ended up in a line to take a buss and then a cable car up to the highest point of the park. It wasn’t a hike, but I’m definitely not complaining. Being in a cable car over and between the massive limestone pillars this park is famous for was amazing.
After walking around on the top for a while, I used Google translate to ask a woman at a concessions stand how to get to an area where I could hike. She pointed me towards a bus that took me to Tianzi Mountain. This area was pretty cool. There were little booths to buy food and souvenirs. Once again I used Google translate to haggle and bought myself a ring carved out of a rock for myself and a couple of bracelets for my some friends. I didn’t pay full price for anything and the total I spent was half of what I was originally asked for. Pretty solid. This app is my saving grace.
I walked around the area and saw tons of the limestone pillars from the various overlooks. There were tons of tourists here, almost all of them from other parts of China. One thing I thought was interesting is that even though Chinese culture doesn’t lead to people lining up or giving a lot of personal space to each other that does not apply to taking pictures. People would queue up and wait patiently while someone had a photoshoot in front of an overlook and make sure that they were out of the way of the picture being taken. People also liked to take a lot of pictures of me. Some people knew enough English to ask or just politely held up their camera to me to make sure I was okay with it and I took pictures with them. Others just grabbed me or took photos of me without asking like when I was slurping noodles out of a bowl and probably looked fantastic. It was pretty aggravating. I get why Kanye doesn’t like the paparazzi. It’s so strange to me that people will spend time taking pictures of a random human when they are standing in the middle of one of the most amazing natural places on planet Earth.
The only person that I met there that wasn’t from China was a Portuguese guy. He was eating his lunch on the bench next to mine and we started chatting. He claimed that he was there taking photos and video for movies on environmentalism, but I got the impression that he was just a jerk with a fancy camera. He seemed like a total poser and was high key rude. He said racist things right to the Chinese tourists’ faces but only ever after he confirmed that they spoke no English and wouldn’t understand him. So he was also a coward. I bailed on that conversation pretty quickly.
After I finished eating, I got on another bus to the part of the park called the Hallelujah Mountains where the Avatar movie was filmed. That’s honestly the whole reason I came to this park in the middle of nowhere in China by myself. When Avatar came out in 2009 and I heard that the floating mountains in that movie were inspired by this place I knew I had to see them, making this the longest standing item on my bucket list. Check. In case you lived under a rock or somehow weren’t born in 2009 here’s a picture of the floating mountains from Google.
This part of the park is filled with monkeys. Anyone who knows me knows that monkeys and apes are my biggest fear because after watching them wage war on each other in the Jane Goodall documentary and seeing the woman on Opera who had her face eaten by one how could you not believe that Planet of the Apes will happen? Here I am being brave. These pictures don’t feature me running away from them later which may or may not have happened.
After passing the monkeys, I got to the part of the park where Avatar was filmed. It was incredible. Unfortunately, my iPhone 5s camera is not capable of showing this place off the way I wish it could.
At this point, I had been in the park all day and was ready to head back to the hotel. This was when I realized that not being able to read the signs that were all in Mandarin makes getting out of the park a challenge. I ended up randomly getting on busses and hoping they would take me to the exit. A woman on the bus tried to subtly take a picture of me, but I saw her zooming in on my face so that didn’t quite work. A guy about my age started grabbing my shoulder to try to get me to turn around and started speaking English to me, but because I didn’t appreciate being grabbed without my consent I just turned around and went off on a rant in French. It was great because I didn’t actually have to talk to him and because it definitely took his ego down a few notches when he couldn’t understand me like he had assumed he would be able to. His friends laughed at him, and he stopped grabbing me.
The busses that I took ended up leading me back up to the cable cars at the top of the park. I took that back down because getting out any other way seemed pretty unlikely at that point considering it was raining and I didn’t know where any paths started.
I ate dinner at the buffet again, and watched Stranger than Fiction on the English movie channel until I went to sleep.
Day 3
I slept in the next morning until it was time to check out at noon. My cab got into the city at about one and my train was supposed to leave at four. However, it was delayed three times and I wasn’t able to leave until after 7:45. This gave me a lot of time to people watch. There were a lot of different kinds of people there. Some business people, some people are barefoot and shirtless and pushing hand carts from their farms, a few other tourists, girls in dresses that made them look like Princess Peach, and some toddlers wearing pants that looked like baby sized assless chaps with noting underneath. I believe that the function is to have all the clothes out of the way so they can do their business anywhere, anytime. My evidence being a puddle of urine in the middle of the station.
Day 4
I got back to Shanghai at two the next afternoon. I definitely almost missed my stop because I didn’t see Shanghai written on any signs in English or Mandarin, but when I saw almost everyone else on the train getting off I showed someone the final destination on my ticket and they pointed outside. I got off just before the train left again.
Jiayi and I went to Al’s Diner for awesome lunch and split some awesome fish tacos and blueberry lemon ricotta pancakes. Al’s is the go-to western style restaurant in the French Concession and sells food that I miss even being back in the United States, so you know it’s good.
We just relaxed for the rest of the day until it was time to go out to dinner to celebrate Jiayi’s belated birthday. Her actual birthday was a few days before I got to China. We decided to go to Kampai Classic for dinner. It’s a Japanese style place that does specials on tons of different beef that they cook right in front of you or don’t cook at all. It was awesome. Angel met us there and we got a bottle of saki. When we finished eating, we took the rest of the bottle to the bund.
Day 5
Jiayi and I slept in and went to a really cute Taiwanese restaurant for lunch. I discovered that Taiwanese omelets are one of my favorite things.
After eating, we walked around French Concession.
We obviously had to stop for some matcha bubble tea. Then we went and got massages. Massages in China are different from in the US. They give you thin clothes to wear so that you’re totally covered and the masseuses don’t touch your skin. An hour and a half in a high end spa cost about 30 USD.
That night, we met up with Angel at her apartment to watch “Moonlight” and “Lion” and drink wine and get Mexican food delivered.
Day 6
The next day, Jiayi had work, so I slept in again and went back to Al’s Diner for lunch because those fish tacos are bomb. I got it to go and went to a little park to eat because it was one of those days that’s so pretty you just need to be outside.
After I finished eating, I walked about thirty minutes to the Jing’an Buddhist temple. That was my first experience with an active Buddhist temple, and it was very interesting. People were praying and bowing and burning incense and throwing coins into huge metal pots. As I walked through, I saw offerings at the feet of the statues of some generals. The offerings were peaches and what looked like spam.
There were people praying to a statue of the first Buddha. My personal favorite thing I saw was monks playing games on their phones. The monks live in the upper levels of the temple that people aren’t allowed to visit. I could see their clothes hanging out to dry on the upper balconies. I spent a while walking through the temple and looking at all of the statues and other art.
Next, I went to the People’s Square and walked through the park. I tried to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it was closed until July 1st to prepare for an exhibit. It started pouring rain, but I had my umbrella, so I just sat under it on a bench and watched because it was beautiful. Afterwards, I went home and did laundry. Jiayi got off work and we went to market and tried green tea and rice gelato.
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