Zhangjiajie to Fenghuang (9th of September)

Having planned to leave Zhangjiajie city at 8.30 a.m. we got the bus out at 2.30 p.m. On the no. 3 bus from the hostel we passed our note written by the Chinese student to the ticket lady, which said something along the lines of ‘Please tell us when we are at the bus station, thank-you’. After points and smiles and ‘xie xie’s we got to the long distance bus station. Producing another note, this time written by the man working at the hostel, we got two tickets for the four hour trip to Fenghuang for 60RMB each. A man standing near the counter kept saying Fenghuang and a lady pointed at him and said Fenghuang. He then pointed to himself and mimed driving, so we had to presume he was the bus driver. He picked up my rucksack and rushed out the door. Thinking I might never see it again I darted behind him with Jenny following behind. In the process I knocked a lady’s hat off and didn’t notice, but thankfully Jenny was there to act out an apology.

Being the driver of a bus from one tourist hotspot to another he had clearly had practice in hand signalling to foreigners. He managed to communicate to us that:
-It was hot in the bus and we should stand outside
-There was a toilet to our left
-If we were hungry we should go and buy food at one of the stands
-We could open the window but would need to close it when the air conditioning was put on (although I thought he might have meant when it started raining)
-We should sit at the front for the better view (even though we had tickets for seats 15 and 16).

As the bus got going we realised we had put our lives in the hands of yet another crazy bus driver. He was eager to overtake absolutely everything (even on bends) and beeped his horn all the time. The horn was extremely loud and we wondered if we’d get off the bus deaf. Thinking about it the driver’s brilliant hand signalling skills might have been partly attributable to deafness he brought upon himself.

The countryside was lovely though and it was really interesting to look out the window. There were puppies everywhere, most of them beige coloured and of course very sweet. One puppy was lying at the edge of the road its tail stretched out behind it and its head in the ditch drinking water. The villages were pretty and so different from home. We passed through the watermelon-growing region where there were polytunnels in the fields and stalls of melons at the side of the road. Later we went through the tea growing area with tea bushes rising up the hillsides and a giant teapot monument. Outside the houses chilli peppers were being dried in the sunshine, as well as rice and maize. There seemed to be a big road building project underway, with half built bridges towering over the villages and lots of noise.

After a hot, noisy and rather hairy trip through the Chinese countryside we approached the riverside town of Fenghuang, (another) hotspot for Chinese tourists. Not entirely sure where we were, let alone where to go we attached ourselves to a Chinese couple who helped lead the way to the riverside area. It was very lively and picturesque in the town. All the buildings were lit up, music was pumping and people were everywhere. Along the noisy alleys by the river were shops and stalls selling all sorts of colourful things from shoes to animals woven from grasses.

We are not a zoo exhibit (Wulingyaung, 6th of September)

After our day attempting rest in Zhangjiajie City we were off to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Wulingyuan (Zhangjiajie National Forest Park). I’d discovered the National Park from one of my perusals of the World’s Heritage Sites and been looking forward to it ever since. There is a serious lack of English information on this area, but we did stumble across a few useful blogs. Lonely Planet has a bit of info but nothing that’s sufficient to guide you through. And we think you are pretty unlikely to see a clouded leopard, so don’t let Lonely Planet get your hopes up! Over 3,000 karst pillars can be found in Wulingyuan, some of which featured in the film Avatar (which I haven’t watched). There are also around 3,000 plant species and sadly an awful lot of Chinese tourists.

A German couple was going to the youth hostel in the park too so we arranged to meet them at 7:30am to go to the bus station where minibuses leave regularly to the park entrance. They wanted to get a taxi to the bus, which is not really our style. Taxis seem to me to be an unnecessary carbon (and money) expenditure, especially since the buses are going anyway. But sometimes it’s not so easy to persuade others to your way of thinking… The lady from the hostel who spoke the best English wrote us a note for the driver, something along the lines of “Hello, please drive us to the bus station, 6RMB is ok”. We all laughed at the last bit and she seemed to take offence. The taxi driver produced 40RMB out of his pocket indicating that he would drive us to the National Park for this. The bus would also have cost 10RMB each, so the taxi did a u-turn and we headed into the hills, past people selling grapes and watermelons.

The taxi driver didn’t drop us right by the entrance, but instead in some courtyard where his friends immediately tried to sell us tickets and tours. Our tickets (from the actual ticket centre) cost us a slightly painful 245 RMB each and we joined the masses walking in through the entrance. Near the entrance were plenty of signs with ‘Don’t feed the monkeys’ and others telling us we were in a monkey ‘infested’ area. I wonder if UNESCO approves of this wording? No sign of the ‘pests’ though.

Surrounded by the Chinese tourist throng we made our way along the ‘Golden Whip Stream’. Tour groups would scurry along with their guides speaking to them through amplified headsets and presumably telling them the name of each of the rock formations. Think we saved ourselves a bit of money there. A digital panel told us it was 22’C with 96% humidity. The peaks that we could see were very pretty, but most of them were shrouded in cloud and fog. There were a great many different trees and plants and quite a few trees near the path were labelled, which was handy since they were all rather foreign to us. Around the river there were lots of huge blue winged damselflies and we got excited by the sound of birds whistling, only to discover that whistles were one of the popular purchases at many of the souvenir selling shacks. We did see a kingfisher, dipper and some other birds though.

The Chinese tourists were delighted by the presence of two white skinned tourists, saying ‘hellow’ to us, making us pose for pictures or just staring at us, giggling and muttering ‘laowai’ (old foreigner) to each other. At this point we were far more accommodating towards them than over the coming days. It just became quite wearing to be pointed at and having to pose for pictures ALL the time. But this is presumably the price you have to pay for being a tourist in China.

To our pleasure we did walk right into a contaminated zone. There were monkeys all over the place, up the trees, on the rockfaces, springing through the air, but chiefly around the path where the Chinese may have been demonstrating a spot of illiteracy and feeding the monkeys crackers, biscuits and peanuts in plastic wrapping. One even managed to get itself an ice cream. As we were photographing a mother and her two youth someone shook the branch they were sitting on and thinking it was us she came rushing towards us and hissing with an aggressive stance. Imagining images of me lying in hospital with rabies might have been a bit of an overreaction.

The monkeys had mastered the art of fishing through the rubbish bins (bins shaped like tree trunks, but made out of concrete, where the side for recyclables just sloped down into the section for other waste in a very Chinese fashion). It felt like we were just looking at monkeys in the zoo and it feels so wrong that these ‘wild’ monkeys have become so dependent on people.

One woman walked past eating a cucumber on a stick and the monkeys came running at her, resulting in her screaming, throwing the cucumber on the ground and dashing off. The monkeys couldn’t stuff the food into their mouths fast enough, but when the cucumber monkey got to the unpeeled bit of cucumber she started scraping only the flesh out with her teeth. In all there must have been about thirty monkeys and they all seemed distressed when a male monkey lumbered his way over the rock.

Continuing on our way there were more shouts of ‘laowai’ proceeded by fits of giggles and more requests to pose for photos. Men walking very quickly would zoom past us with these sticks on their shoulders carrying rucksacks and others carrying people on sedan chairs. We decided not to go up the first steps we came across to the plateau, but instead continued along the river where it was a bit more deserted. The walkway was separated from the river by railings, which looked like tree trunks but were again made from concrete. On the way we found some small toads and a huge green frog.

From an area with more stalls and Chinese tourists we took the free bus which we, according to our map, could take to the top of the plateau. But it turned out that the bus can’t get up there and it drops you at an elevator that for £10 takes you up the side of one of the peaks. Seeing as there was no other option we paid the fee, at least we had the lift to ourselves.

We went to all the lookout points, saw lots of fog, a few peaks, more padlocks locked to railings and as it was getting dark loads of humungous toads were emerging from in the trees. Walking down the road in the hope of finding the hostel we saw more toads, some chickens and a large dead snake. It was dark and getting even darker, and we were beginning to suspect that we’d gone the wrong way when we rounded a bend and there it was. In the hostel we met the Germans again and consumed some actually rather tasty pea mash from Mongolia, which everyone was staring at.

Zhangjiajie City (4th and 5th of September)

Catching the bus from the station into the city was no easy feat. We couldn’t find the bus and the Chinese just wanted us to get into a taxi. The guidebooks had misguided us and you actually need to walk across the road, through a paved park area to the stop outside the gondola. We later found out that we got on the wrong side and it’s much quicker if you go on the one that goes to the right. It was a hot and long ride into the city. Someone on the bus spoke English, but they weren’t convinced that there was a hostel above the supermarket where we were headed.

Fortunately the Zhongtian International Hostel did exist and one of the ladies working there could even string some English words together. We made plans for our adventure into Wulingyuan after buying a map of the park for 5RMB. It has place names in English and Chinese and routes of the paths. It’s not entirely accurate though and you can probably get a better one inside. On the first day we would walk from the park entrance to the youth hostel inside the park, on the second perhaps visit the caves and other parts of the park and on the third day walk back out again. But before all that we were going to have a day off, lounge around and do nothing.

Beijing-Zhangjiajie train (3rd/4th of September)

The K267 was due to leave Beijing West station at 11.38, but we’d been warned to be there early because of traffic, security checks and luggage weighing. Getting there wasn’t too much hassle, just two buses at ~10p each. There were yet more police standing upright on street corners, and because it was raining people on the streets were trying hard to sell ponchos. Cyclists had rather ingenious ponchos that covered their handlebars too. The station was like an airport. First we had to go through a security barrier and our possessions through a scanner. Like before they didn’t seem to be taking much notice of the screen and the government just seems to be making more jobs for people. Jenny had read somewhere that we weren’t allowed more than 100ml of flammable liquid, so we’d been thinking we should have separated our methylated spirit into two sets of 100ml. This was all unnecessary worry since they didn’t seem to care.

Trains had waiting rooms allocated to them and we went to room nine where hundreds of people piled in and sat on the floor, benches, stood up or pushed their way towards the front. I began to feel slightly claustrophobic with all these people everywhere and was glad that our large backpacks meant that at least there was a little empty space around us.

About 25 minutes before the train was due to depart people began to stand up and start pushing despite nothing happening at the front. They were quite desperate to get to the train- there was no fire but we think they wanted to stake their claim on the best spots for their luggage and bottoms.

For me one of the joys of train travel is to see the world go past the window, watching how the people live and the changing of the landscapes. When you are on the top bunk of three and all you can see are the railway tracks and the luggage space you might as well be flying, apart from the carbon emissions. Thankfully we did get to sit by the window for very short intervals of time and just watching the Chinese sharing our carriage was fascinating.

There were 11 compartments without doors in our carriage, with each compartment with three beds on either side. Across the corridor from the beds are drop-down chairs beside little tables. From the top bunks you get a really good view of what everyone is up to. A couple in the corridor tucked into a takeaway spread of rice, meat and beans. The man sat there happily munching on chicken foot. Once remains of the lunch had been put in the bin they started to play cards. No card game we knew, and watching did not get us any closer to understanding how it was played. Below us men gathered to play cards with others watching on from the seats and standing in the corridor. At one point there were at least eleven people in our compartment. The Chinese appear to enjoy playing cards and get quite into it, whacking the cards down with great conviction.

There was also a never ending stream of pedestrian traffic in the corridor- people back and forth with pot noodles, the lady taking tickets and issuing us with our bed number on a plastic card, a lady checking our bags were correctly positioned on the overhead rack, a lady with a basket of children's toys (including a plastic yak and a talking parrot), people with trollies of fruit and veg, a bed sheet covering a soupy gloop and eggs, a lady folding the curtains (jobs for the masses), a trolley full of plastic trays of rice, meat, egg and vegetables and a mismatched selection trolley of items such as pot noodles and toothbrushes. In the evening some ladies came to write our names down on a piece of paper and look at our passports, but we're not entirely sure if that's what they wanted. There was a lot of confusion that we didn't have Chinese names along with our European ones.

As we neared Zhangjiajie City (and had the opportunity to look out the window) we went along a river valley with peaks and rice paddies. Having the top bunks may have been the cheapest, but it wasn't the comfiest of arrangements either, although we did just about manage to sit upright with our legs on the other bunk. At times it felt like I was a battery hen and it was good to get off the train even if we were faced with the hot humidity of Hunan province.