Zhangjiajie

Welcome to a new chapter of our adventure. Our journey has led us through Middle Earth, Narnia and even Ravka. Today I want to tell you about how we have travelled to yet another fantastic place: Pandora. A place inhabited by Na’vi, known for its natural magic and astounding scenery, shown by the movie Avatar. However, we still had many miles to cross from where we left you in our last chapter and that was not an easy journey. We rose early on the last day of May with some annoying news reaching us from far away, nothing serious, just annoying and it kind of set the tone for the day. A bit disgruntled we grabbed our animal companions and walked over to the meeting point of metal worms. To enter a metal worm in the land of dragons and chopsticks is a many steps process, with passports, parchments of entry and animal companions being checked multiple times. As we would also cross a border from the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong to the mainland, additional passport checks were part of this morning. Yet we already got stuck at the first barrier: the first ticket check. We had ordered invisible parchments of entry which were directly connected to our passports. However, when we tried to enter the station the artificially intelligent station guard repeatedly declared that she had no ticket (Sesy’s was fine). We were very confused and were send by an annoyed human station guard to the counter. They found our booking in the invisible library of all things, with all the correct data. Yet their machine also told them that Artey’s passport had no access to trains. Eventually after 15 minutes they found the problem. Artey’s passport number involves 0 and it is basically impossible to tell if this is the letter O or the number 0. At some point during the booking process, we mixed them up - now the system had the wrong number in it and it was apparently not changeable any more. The lady at the counter printed out a version of the parchment of entry for the trains and then we could finally start the process to reach our metal speed worm, with around 45 minutes to spare. This might seem long for anyone in the lands where trains are always late. In this scenario it was not. Our first step was the control of our animal companions. The queue for that one was already quite long but thankfully it was more a Kazakh style queue rather than a South Korean one. If your unfamiliar to either, I first and foremost highly recommend going to both places, and secondly a South Korean queue looks like you’re trying to teach your children to queue, a Kazakh queue is how such a queue looks in reality. In other words, like a group of hobbits who are in line for free food. Consequently, the three security guards who were in charge of monitoring the two laser eyed beasts checking everyone’s animal companions had little hope of spotting anything less dangerous and smaller than a hunting rifle in the pile of companions pushed through the beasts. Next, we had to leave the SAR. The non-human border guards were again overwhelmed by our passports, so we had to go to another human, yet it went comparably smooth. Now we had to re-enter the mainland of tea and great walls (we had 35 minutes to go). For that you must fill out a parchment with all kinds of information. When we arrived, there were no parchments left and it took another five minutes until we were brough new ones. After another two minutes we were standing with these parchments in line for the border crossing… with about 80 other people in front of us and five controlling guards who were working at the speed of the sloths in Zootopia. We were growing a bit nervous at this point. Everyone in this line was also a foreigner so most were not accustomed to having to be at a metal worm meeting point two hours earlier. Hence, they were in a similar situation to us, and we could not ask them to let us go first. Our worry grew when we noticed two Germans taking about 10 minutes at the border control before being allowed to pass. Finally with about 10-15 minutes until our worm was set to depart Sesy reached a border guard. Artey, who was in line for another one, quickly switched places with a very nice guy, so that we would only have to explain our itinerary once. This was indeed a smart move. While Sesy’s border control took five minutes, Artey’s, after both of us making clear that we were travelling together, took about two. And then we ran. We still had to get through another parchment of entry control (with our printed-out parchment which takes extra time). But with 1 ½ minutes until departure and completely out of breath we boarded the metal speed worm as the last passengers. The speed worms in this land are going as fast as a dragon flies, they have hot water, sometimes access to the internet of all things (not for foreigners) and plugs (not all of them). The internet of all things had also mentioned something of cold water, consequently we had arrived with empty water bottles. This was a mistake as the cold water was absent and we thus spend the day drinking hot water- could have been worse though, without hot water we would not have had food (we made us noodles for lunch). Shortly after lunch we got out in a city which name I will not bother you with, because it is long and complicated (and I might have forgotten it, it was something with H). There we would stay the next two hours before boarding the next worm. A couple of hours and a dinner of surprisingly good instant phó later, we reached the train station of Zhangjiajie. Our destination was the village of Wulingyuan, half an hour away from there. Apparently, the last bus had already left, at least according to the local carriage drivers. We teamed up with two other girls who seemed to be better prepared than us (basically impossible, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a general idea how to somehow reach most of the places we’re trying to get to). One of them even spoke the local language. She tried to haggle with the carriage drivers. She noticed after a bit that they actually don’t want to go to the same place as we do. But she still haggled a price for us (80 yuan for the two of us, or 100 yuan for the whole car if we would wait for another two people). So, we waited and finally got into a carriage in a dark underground parking lot where we were soon joined by a Japanese and a Chinese. Half an hour later the driver was however asking for 80 yuan as that was what was told to him by the guy who had haggled the price with our translator at the station. We did not have a common language, but the Chinese was fluent in English and after a very long discussion we gave him 70 (there was a big misunderstanding). Finally, after a bit of confusion, we finally reached our inn (was called Destination inn where we booked it, but the sign on the door said Destination hostel). We still had to get some water and we also felt like we had deserved a snack of stinky tofu after the day. But finally, we retired to bed.

1.6.

So far, I have bored you with a very long story about a travel day. To anyone still reading, I am now going to tell the tale of the day we exhausted ourselves on the steps to Pandora. We rose at dawn and made our way to the entrance of the Wulingyuan scenic interest area aka Zhangjiajie national park aka Pandora. Already masses of other travellers (mainly from the land of porcellan and many people itself) were waiting at the entrance. After getting tickets we were whisked away by a bus until we reached a departure point for another method of transportation. I would call them metal worms but rather than worms there were a variety of animals, including a horse, a monkey, and a pig.

They transported travellers through a valley of high pillars. We had spend enough time riding worms the previous day and instead took the walking path beside it. Some others took the same route in either direction (they usually took one of the animals for one way and then walked the other). We marvelled at the high sandstone pillars covered with bushes in between the cliffs. It was magnificent. Roughly 3000 steps of an average person later we reached the destination point of the animals where most travellers went back to go to another sight inside the park. We had other plans. The park is divided into two parts: a lower level and an upper level. You can travel between the two by multiple cable cars or you can walk up around 3 km of stairs. And we would not be ourselves, if we would not take the option that very few others take: the stairs. I don’t know if 3km of stairs sounds like much to you, but I can tell you unless you are a faun or have a goat to ride on, it is quite exhausting and takes 2-3 hours. But the view was absolutely stunning. We finally reached Tianzi mountain peak. From there you can again take busses to the other destinations on the upper level (if you think now, why didn’t you just walk, it’s a 45 minute bus ride in between these sights).

Our next stop was Yuanjiajie Yes, I know it sounds very much like the city we arrived in but it is a small village with a bus stop, many snack stalls and mostly beautiful nature. We had lunch there at one of these stalls where we joined by a local couple over a bowl of noodle soup. As our companions (who did not speak a word of English) were locals we just copied their behaviour to not do anything wrong. To our delight he asked for additional peanuts and vegetables which were then just brought for the whole table free of charge. After lunch we walked a few more steps down to find a dead end, then some more steps up to then take the bus to the next sights: the fascinating terrace, the highest natural bridge and most importantly the pillar of heaven and earth, the inspiration for Pandora. These are one of the most popular spots in the park and just a few 100 meters apart from each other. And I cannot explain to you how absolutely stunning the view is from that spot. You stand at the edge of a 400 meter high cliff, facing a similar cliff, covered with bushes and small trees 700 meters in the distance. In between are a variety of hundred meters high sand coloured pillars reaching for the sky.

They are topped with bushes and you can see the different layers that show how they have grown throughout the past millennials. This is a place of mystical creatures and great tales and everyone who tells me otherwise needs to go and see it for themselves. We have seen many stunning places on this travel from Halong Bay, over Milford Sound, to Taroko Gorge, but I think this one was the most impressive. After marvelling at the view from various angles we started our way down another flight of steps. While we met very few people on our way up, we met even fewer on our way down. The top was very crowded but no one liked stairs. We were rewarded by some stunning viewpoints which were deserted and gave us the chance to look at the sandstone forest in peace. Again on the lower level, we followed the golden whip stream which revealed a view at the pillars from below which was also magnificent. We met a couple of monkeys on the way and now also more humans as there were no stairs anymore. I have to admit, while we didn’t perceive the way down that exhausting our legs had started to shake when we halted to take a quick picture. We didn’t mind too much; this was the last stop for us for that day anyways. However, we could not just put our feet up when we reached Wulingyuan again.

There was still another matter to solve: We were running out of gold. In the land of ancient vase making dynasties and cheap electric cars it is uncommon to pay with peasant methods like visa or mastercard. You need Wechat or Alipay or a card from here. While we have downloaded both until that evening they had not worked as it takes many steps for foreigners to get access to these applications. Furthermore, they need access to the library of all things to work (as usual we do not have access to that outside of publicly available access points or our inns). The one machine where we had hoped to get more gold that morning had decided to not react to our fingertips. On the quest to mine new gold we went to the other side of town. Thankfully, we successfully finished the quest and rewarded ourselves with a nice dinner at a local eatery. We also bought some supplies for our upcoming journey on the following day. We would have loved to finish the day watching some news but at the moment we are living behind the great firewall set up by the government of this land. We actually had been prepared for that and had acquired a system to surpass the wall. Yet the government has gotten one step ahead of us and currently basically none of these systems work anymore. If you were wondering why we are not reachable anymore via our normal ways of communication, that’s why (Whatsapp works rarely, Instagram is completely down, same with gmail). If you want to tell us something, wait for another 12 days or write us an email (we set up automatic forwarding on another email address).