Traveling to Hunan - part 1

In the last week of March, Inga and me travelled to Hunan province in central China. Our destination was the beautiful eerie mountains of Wu lingyuan ( The hallelujah mountains) in Zhangjiajie and the old city of Fenghuang.

I hope you will bear with me now, because there are a lot of pictures coming in this post, as they can tell the tale much better than I can with words...

Our travel plan was as follows:

26/3  Qingdao - Changsha (capital city of the province Hunan) by plane

27/3  Changsha - Zhangjiajie  4 hours by bus

28/3  Zhangjiajie 

29/3  Zhangjiajie - Fenghuang  5.5 hours by bus

30/3  Fenghuang

31/3  Fenghuang - Changsha  5 hours by bus

01/4  Changsha - Qingdao  by plane

27/3: The city of Changsha held no interest for us, so we only slept there at a really nice hostel before setting of early the next day with the bus to the mountains at Zhangjiajie. It was a newly opened hostel, and we were their first 'alien' visitors.

The bus ride to Zhangjiajie and the mountains of Wu lingyuan took us 4 hours. It was a nice bus, and the roads were good. Plenty of interesting scenery to see from the windows. Unfortunately shots taken from a bus window is quite shaky, so I had to sketch down one of the valleys we were driving through to get down a picture of how it looked. The fields in this area was all bright yellow with what I think was ryps...

We arrived in Zhangjiajie city, and jumped straight on a small local bus to Zhangjiajie village, where the entrance was located for the mountains. We came too late in the afternoon to do any hiking in the mountains that evening, so we explored the small one street village instead. This picture below is of the local market...

And as you walked from one end of the village to the other in a couple of minutes, we decided to spend the evening at a nice restaurant trying out the local speciality. There were a quite a few restaurant to choose from, and all of them empty, as the season had not yet started. We chose the one that had the local dish of some chicken of some sort, famous for this area. It turned out to be a spicy dish, where you got the head and feet and everything, but not that much meat... If you look closely, it is the head of the chicken that I am holding to my mouth...

The menu was fun to read through, and many times their translation to english left you wondering what the dish was really like... With a bottle of wine it turned out to a nice evening! 

28/3: The next day we got up early in order to enter the mountain park before the chinese tourists came in their busses. We wanted to see as much as possible on this day so we decided not to climb the mountains, but to take the easy and fast way up. The scenery became fast spectacular, and the day had a really promising start!

These mountains are famous in China, and have been painted for many generations. They also say that these mountains was the foremost inspiration for Pandora and Pandoras floating mountains in James Cameron movie Avatar. They did a lot of advertisement for this 'fact' all around the place, and had even build some sculptures of the animals in that film to exhibit. 

The place was with one word fantastic! We first came to one of the bigger mountain tops, and the hike around the edge took us about 1.5 hours. Breathtaking views all around!

Then we decided not to take the same way down, but rather try the stairs. So down we went, all 3850 steps...

It took us quite some time reach the bottom, not only because of the distance, but mainly because we were entertained on out way down by the wildlife. There were monkeys in hundreds all over the place! And so used to humans, that you could come really close to them. This young fella was really cute. Probably hoping to get some goodies from our bags...

We went to have a look at this 'best scenic spot', but we never figured out what we are suppose to look at, any ideas someone???

We finally reached the bottom of the mountain, and started walking through the valley to the next place to get up to one of the mountain tops. The valley was nice and green even if most of the trees were still bare. Some trees was in blossom, so there were a few patches of white and pink here and there. It began raining, but we were dressed for bad weather so it didn't bother us much.

After a two hours hike through the valley we came to the other end, where we found an elevator that first  went up through the inside of the mountain, before continuing on the outside. The view from the elevator was again spectacular, and the 'spectacularness' continued!

Because of the rain, some very low clouds started to appear. The whole landscape became surreal, and we were happy for another long hike around this second mountain top.

Then it started to get late, and we had to find our way down again. We found another step of stairs, and we started downhill again. These stairs were longer than the previous ones (must have been closer to 5000 steps) and by the time we were down (it seemed like they would never end...) we could really feel our feet and calves! Then we still had half of the valley left to hike back to the entrance gate. By this time we were the only ones left, and it was beginning to get quite dark. This beautiful magnolia tree with the now misty mountains as background was a nice end picture of our day in the mountains.

As you can imagine, after a 11 hours walk/hike in, on top, down from and in-between the mountains, we were tired. I could almost not feel my legs anymore (or feel them too much...) so we decided to treat ourselves with the best the village had to offer food-ways. This was a small food stall in the street just opposite our hotel. We bought a bottle of wine from the store, and then ordered some grilled chicken, vegetables and what nots from out street restaurant. A super ending to a super day!! Cheers!

Next stop on our trip was the old village of Fenghuang. That will be my next post, so much more pictures to come!!