I arrived in Zhangjiajie two night ago (Sunday the 11th) after a pleasant and relatively uneventful day of travel. Saturday I spent the morning blogging - a more productive form of procrastination - instead of packing, went to lunch at my favorite restaurant in Qufu one last time, finally packed, and then headed off at 7:30pm by taxi with Karrin, my travel companion for the next 4 weeks or so, to the train station about 45 minutes away in Jining. We were about and hour and a half early because we wanted to be sure not to miss the train. In the station one of our Chinese friends, Mike, came to visit. He lives in Jining and as a senior at QuShiDa he is free to spend his time studying just about wherever he pleases. He spent about 30 minutes entertaining us with anecdotes about his own travels in China and helped us kill sometime. Though I have only spent a few weeks total traveling in China, I have discovered that "killing time" is a large part of it. Trains usually leave in the evening or at night, so you have to truck your bags around with you for half the day visiting tourist spots or get to the train station, bus station, or airport early and just sit. If its only an hour or so it's not bad, if you have good company it's better.
The next morning, I woke up refreshed at about 7:30am and climbed down from my bunk. It is impossible to get down gracefully as there is only one small handrail and a very long way to fall if you miss a step on the ladder. With as little humiliation as possible, I made it down and sat on one of the fold down chairs next to the window for some muffins and nescafe that I brought along. All trains, like most every other place in China, have boiled water machines from which you can make tea and ramen noodles or simply get safe drinking water. I made instant coffee, which drew some curiosity from my Chinese friend on the bottom bunk, especially as I attempted to pour my nescafe/coffeemate concoction into a small water bottle. Eating my breakfast, I happily gazed out the window at the passing landscape, completely different from anything I had yet seen in China, and exactly what I had expected China to look like before my arrival. Rolling hills and mountains of neatly spaced rows of green crops, red, clay like soil, and antique houses with terracotta roofs next to small streams and ponds blurred by.
At about 9:30am on Sunday we arrived in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, with - you guessed it - lots of time to kill before flying to Zhangjiajie. Hunan was the home of Mao, his home only a hundred kilometers away in Shaoshan. Throughout the province, therefore, statues of the leader still rise above plazas and gift shops sell miniatures for high prices, though feelings towards him are now ambivalent. In our loney planet I read that a colossal statue of Mao was outside the Changsha Museum and also that, on weekends, a small antiques fair formed outside its gates. We wandered for about 30 minutes with our bags looking for 480 Wuli lu and became frustrated when we were at 520 and still hadn't found it. We sat for a moment, deciding what to do, catching our breath, and resting ourselves from the weight of our luggage. We decided to go the corner to check that we were in fact on the correct street. To the left we saw a small street filled with vendors selling jade jewelry, delicate pottery, bronze figures, and old stamps. Wandering down it, we drew some attention but were allowed to pass through looking without too many "Hallos" and very little hassling. From there we found a small garden, quite garden in the center of the city with grandmas doting on their grandchildren. One of my favorite things about winter in China is that the toddlers are bundled so warmly that they really are just little round bodies of fluff and fleece.
We sat there for a while before discovering that the park was actually part of the entrance to the museum and Mao was just a few meters away.
After the park, we looked to our Lonely Planet guide for Lunch and found a dim sum restaurant. It was nice to eat something different after 4 months in China. We got a number of small plates from the carts that rolled around and relaxed with a pot of tea for a while. We then made our way to the Civil Aviation Hotel and took a shuttle to the airport. We picked up and paid for our tickets, which we had reserved online, and checked in-Only 3 1/2 hours to kill. So we wandered the airport, napped on uncomfortable chairs, and eventually boarded the plane for a quick and easy flight.
Arriving in Zhangjiajie, we were tired and anxious to finally get to your hostel and settle in for the night. Doing so would not be as easy as we had hopped. We lugged our bags to an area filled with wait taxis and men waiting to take or money. "100 kuai, 100 kuai," 100 bucks, they shouted at us. "Tai gui le," too expensive, I responded, surprising them with my ability to speak some Chinese. The information we had gotten online from our hostel told us that a taxi should only be about 20 kuai. Eventually we were able to haggle them down to 40, they would take nothing less, or we were just too tired to keep trying. We had to call the hostel for the drive to figure out directions and we sped off, over paying for a 5km death ride. Drivers in China are reckless, they run lights, go to fast, cut through on coming traffic in the opposite lane. I've become almost immune to this type of driving, and I fear what type of driver I will be when I finally get behind the wheel again this summer. This taxi driver was so reckless that I was actually worried by his driving. Spinning around corners, darting into on coming traffic to pass cars already going fast, the horn never stopped. We quickly got to our Hostel and made our way in. Warn out and a little pissed off at China and its eagerness to rip off westerns. "Can I really do this for another 7 weeks?" I wondered to myself.
The hostel was not everything we had hopped it to be. We were visiting Wulingyuan in the dead season, so the hostel was almost empty except for a few old men drinking and smoking at a table in the lobby by the tv. We went to our room and dropped our bags, only to discover that the electricity for the room could not handle both the lights and the heat to be on a the same time. We locked the door and wandered through the halls, down the elevator, through halls again, and back to the lobby from our remote room to see if the receptionist could fix the problem for us. He didn't speak much English, so we motioned for him to come upstairs. He tried exactly what we had tried, inserting the key card that allows the electricity to go on in the room, and then turning the heat back on every 30 seconds after it shorted out. He indicated that we should wait there for a moment and he would be back. 20 minutes later we went back down to find that he had "forgotten" about us in hopes that we would forget about the problem. Eventually, after trying to let us into a number of rooms for which the key cards weren't working, we found ourselves in a bigger room with TV, private bath, and working lights and heats. The upgrade, we decided was enough, though our opinions of this Hostel are still very low.
Finally we went to bed early, not feeling very secure as the memory of the old men laughing at us downstairs fill our heads, but eager to go out an explore the next day. At about 1am, however, we were woken by the banging of and on doors and the loud voices of women. I should mention that the hostel begins on the 4th floor of the building. From the poster in the elevator, it appears that the 3rd floor is occupied by a business of less than reputable practices. Lets call it a "massage parlor." So at 1 in the morning, Karrin and I both tucked in our beds, tried our best to not think that the prostitutes were going to come banging on our door. They didn't, but our sleep was less than perfect that night.
The next morning, we woke, showered, dressed and prepared for our day. We left our hostel early because we had yet to buy train tickets for our next destination, and as I have mentioned before, traveling in China is a nightmare. This time of year is especially bad as all 1.3 billion people in China move throughout the country returning home for Spring Festival and the Chinese New Year, this year on the 26th of January. The festival is about 3 or 4 weeks long, and so traveling during this time is especially difficult as tickets are quickly sold out.
With that in mind, we took the bus to the train station early, hoping to get tickets without too much hassle. We went to the main entrance of the hall where I said to the guard, "Women yao mai piao." We want to buy tickets. Remarkably he understood me and pointed to the next entrance over. Buying the tickets was easy, almost too easy. They had them available, and hard sleepers no less. Hopefully when we leave this afternoon, everything will go as planned. After getting our tickets we were hungry, having not eaten breakfast yet. We saw a row of tent like huts down the street we had come from and returned to search for some breakfast. We saw some steaming bamboo baskets, asked what they were, "Shenme?" and got two bags full of baozi, steamed buns filled with pork, garlic, and ginger. Our next stop for the day was Wulingyaun Park, the real purpose for our visit, but we really had no idea how to get there. Over head we saw gondolas or cable cars disappearing up the mountain. That must be it, so we followed the cable, eating our steaming baozi, and, as we walked, surprising people that westerns don't just eat KFC and MacDonalds. There are times when I really hate being a foreigner in China, and other times when I enjoy it. This was one of those times. I find my position here in China important, not just because I am a teacher, but because I have the opportunity to shape peoples view of Westerners and Americans specifically. I can show them that we are not that different, and that we have a genuine interest in China and its culture.
We found the building from which the cable cars emerged, and entered, happy to see that this was a way to our destination. Signs were in English but we still had some questions because the tickets to the park were expensive, 225 yuan. To put this into perspective, we each paying 40 yuan a night for our rooms, and had just paid 4 yuan each for our bag of baozi. Luckily, the women working the counter was able to call for an English speaker to come down from the offices to help us and soon we were stepping into the Gondola. The pictures that we had seen of Wulingyuan were magical and we hoped that our adventure would live up to expectations.
The gondola ride took about 30-40 minutes, and I'm pretty sure that my jaw was dropped for just about the entire trip, the entire day really.
I kept repeating, "This is incredible. This is amazing. Oh my god, this is unreal." Wulingyuan is a large area of land that until recently was relatively unexplored and remote. These mountains or cliffs, I'm not sure which to call them, rise thousands of feet in the air, offering the most spectacular landscape I have every seen. It is like something out of a fantasy movie. No where on earth could really look like this. Taking the gondola to the top, we passed over small rustic houses, saw a woman washing clothes against the rocks in a stream, a man walking beside a horse.
It was if we were on some sort of amusement park ride through the "old" China. After each peak we crossed, we couldn't believe that we would go over another, higher one.
Finally we made it to the top. Because we were so high up and because we were going in the morning, the air was still filled with fog or clouds - who knows which. Views were slightly obstructed, but it was incredible nonetheless. A number of walking trails traverse the peaks allowing for even more breathtaking views and once in a lifetime experience. Because it was winter, ice and snow covered much of the paths and steps. China has a thing for steps. Where in America we would just leave the path cleared and a bit rugged, in China they build steps. In someways it makes climbing easier- the path is paved and smooth, less opportunity to turn an ankle, but it also make hiking a bit more painful. The uniform, repetitive motion quickly causes your thighs to start burning. The paths here were, however, a nice combination of each and not to difficult to maneuver.
Walking around the top of the mountain, each turn in the path, each clearing of trees offered another photo opportunity, another spectacular vista. We found our way to a temple at the top. Bright red against the grays and blues of the mountains and sky. Besides the views, what I enjoyed most was the quiet. Few people were there that day and so frequently we were entirely by ourselves. Above all the honking, shouting, and bustle of the streets below, for the first time in a while there was real silence. The air was fresh and crisp, the environment serene. It truly was like being in another world.
We had not anticipated how cold it would be at the top. Every picture had been taken during warm, lush seasons, and we found it nearly impossible in our preparations to find any sort of information on average climates, let alone a weather forecast. We moved quickly, therefore, hopping to stay warm. For the most part we were successful, especially as the day progressed. We also found the air to be thinner - though perhaps we imagined some of this. Hiking about we quickly lost our breaths, but stopping meant cooling down so we did our best to find a happy medium.
Perhaps the most spectacular part of trip was the Plank Road Alongside Guigu Cliffs. This "road" was really nothing more than a cement walkway about 3 feet wide. And when they say "alongside cliffs," the mean alongside cliffs.
The paths is literally build along the cliff, nothing above, nothing below - except a long, long fall. Walking this path was both exhilarating and absolutely terrifying. "Was I really doing this? Was this precariously secured "road" all that kept me from a free fall.
I spent the 20 minute walk daring myself to steal quick glances over the edge before retreating to the relative safety of the wall. Along the path, however, the views were some of the best, and I kept reminding myself that in all probability I would never do or see anything like this again.
Throughout the walk, I also had to coach Karrin through. "You're not going to die - and even if you did, this would be a pretty cool way to go." For a fear of heights, this path was probably not the best choice, but it was why we were here and so together we made it through. Walking along, the path wound along the many bends of the cliff, When I couldn't see too far ahead, I felt safest. It was when the path stretched clearly before me that my heart beat began to quicken.
The small concrete path with open railing seemingly levitated beside beside the cliff - 50 feet of cliff above, a whole lot more below. These parts were where the reality of what I was doing and where I was really set in. "What on earth - or rather above it- was I doing? This image returned to both Karrin and I later that day when we went to bed. "every time I close my eyes, I fall off the cliff," she said in the dark. "I know, I'm falling too."
Also being sold along the market were pin-wheel type toys, bought and carried about by both children and adults. Decorations for Spring Festival also include red and gold posters of traditional phrases or images of plump children, and also never-ending knots. Red and gold-or yellow-are unavoidable during this time or year. 
All that remains of the structure build in the late 16th and early 17th centuries is the front wall. Despite being destroy by fire during a typhoon in the 1835 and years of wear, the remaining wall includes and incredible amount of decoration and detailed ornaments. Along the street leading up the St. Paul's were a number of shops selling (an allowing you to sample) some specialties of Macau, among these dry almond cookies-very tasty-and beef jerky type flattened meat-also very tasty but strange. Really the best part of the day was walking about, enjoying the escape from mainland China.
