Zhangjiajie, China

From Kunming, I flew to Changsha to meet my friend Maisie and from there we took a train to spend  a few days in Zhangjiajie National Park.

The journey from Changsha started at 6am and we just made it to our guesthouse before the park closed at 6pm. I'm not really sure why, but it took forever. We were exhausted, but were so happy to arrive. We got a few glimpses of the 'Hallelujah Mountains,' which we would be exploring for the next few days.

In the morning, the hosts at our guesthouse drove us to the mountains at the north edge of the park and we explored for a bit. We were absolutely blown away by our first real view of these incredible mountains.

There was also a 'floating farm' up there. It was basically at the top of one of those pillar-shaped mountains. It had little rice patties, so we explored for a bit.

After we explored there, we headed to another part of the park. We took the cable car, which lets you get eye-to-eye with some of the mountains. Unfortunately the air there is really bad, so the views weren't great.

We had heard rumors that there were monkeys in the park and were hoping to see them. It turns out they aren't hard to find. The Chinese tourists swarm around monkey and feed them things like packaged crackers and chocolate (in the wrappers!). Sadly, the monkeys know how to open packaged food. The monkeys eat these foods, which they definitely shouldn't be eating and leave the wrappers on the ground. It made me really angry, but it also doesn't surprise me. From my experience, the way Chinese people treat any bit of nature they can find (of what's left) is infuriating. 

After getting turned around and being really late, we caught the last of the transportation in the park to get back to where we were staying for the night. Because we were staying in a group of houses I couldn't even fairly call a village, we got dinner at the guesthouse and as soon as the sun set, there wasn't much to do but get in bed and go to sleep.

The next morning, we started out trying to get to the main tourist route. We took the bus to a different part of the park from where we were staying. We got coffee and snacks and looked out over the rice terraces and mountains while we tried to navigate.

We wanted to walk from that bus stop area to the main tourist path, but it turns out it's impossible to walk around the park. There are no hiking paths, just buses that shuttle tourists from one viewpoint to the next. It was pretty frustrating. 

We did make it to the main tourist path in the end. It had the most incredible views. It's definitely the main tourist route for a reason!

There were occasionally a temple or pagoda, but we mainly focused on the incredible canyons and mountains.

These mountains, along with a few other places in China, were the inspiration for the floating 'Hallelujah Mountains' in the movie Avatar. They even have a statue of a banshee from the movie, which you can get a picture with. We, of course, got our pictures there!

We encountered the monkeys again. Tourists continued to feed them human food and try to touch them. A monkey almost bit a tourist while he was getting his friend to take a pictures of him with the monkey. I had to leave, because it was making me so angry.

As I have found in other tourist spots in China, people are about ten times more likely to ask me to take a picture with them (or just take pictures of me without asking) in a tourist spots than in any other situation. The tourists here were really quite aggressive at times. Multiple times, people would just ignore us saying we didn't want a picture and take pictures anyway. They shoved selfie sticks in our faces and once or twice a tourist grabbed me and tried to pull me into a picture. When we said we didn't want pictures, they laughed at us like we were cute animals that had learned to say a few words or do a trick. We felt like the monkeys. I nearly cried because I felt so claustrophobic and like my personal space had been violated. Everywhere we went, people were taking pictures of us and treating us like we were part of the attraction. I hope to never experience a situation like that again.

Eventually, when we got further down the trail, we escaped the crowds and managed to be alone for nearly an hour! We definitely needed it at that point. 

The weather turned south after that day. It got really cold and rainy. We decided to cut our trip a day short to head back to Changsha for one night before heading to Guilin. We had seen enough of the park and felt it was time to move on anyway. Zhangjiajie was incredible. It had its highs and lows, but overall it was an amazing landscape and it was completely unlike anything else I've seen.