Zhangjiajie: “Avatar Mountains”

If you’ve seen the movie Avatar, you must be familiar with “the legendary floating Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora!” The mountains on the movie are pretty unbelievable and look like they must have been pulled deep out of someone’s crazy imagination. Surprisingly, these mountains are based off of actual mountains here in China. We (me, Doug, Allison and Kate)  just made a journey to see them in Zhangjiajie. It’s a National Park about 5 hours (by bus) from Xiangtan.

We arrived on Thursday night with only time to eat dinner and check into our hotel. The next morning we  were on our way into the park and ran into another westerner (I think the only other white person we saw on the trip). His name was Ben and he gave us some advice about where to stay once we got to the park. We ended up changing all our plans and trying out his suggestions.

The park was really expensive, even by American standards, but well worth it.

We started our hike through the park and immediately starting seeing wild monkeys all along the path! We could walk right up to them. I’ve never gotten that close to monkeys before.

We continued our ascent and about two and a half hours later we had such an incredible view, the sight made all the hiking worth it.

Ben’s advice was to stay right in the National Park instead of leaving the park and going back the next day. We could only take what could fit in my purse for the night, which wasn’t much!  Now our task was to find the hostel he told us about. We somehow found ourselves in a tiny little village on top of the Zhangjiajie Mountains. It was completely serene and so peaceful. We wandered around for about 30 minutes taking everything in. It almost felt intrusive walking around this intimate tiny village. The villagers didn’t pay us any notice and we were able to watch them carry on their daily chores.

Then it started to get quite cold. So Doug started asking the villagers for directions to our hostel. After a few wrong turns and some backtracking we found it. We still can’t figure out how a hostel made it to this location, but we were happy it was there. It cost 35Yuan a piece, that’s $5.22 and no, I’m not joking. We ordered dinner and while we were waiting we all got so cold! The kitchen was just off the hostel. Doug grabbed a quick shot.

We quickly ate and then ran inside to drink some hot chocolate and warm up. I guess the $5.22 didn’t cover heat in our rooms…. We asked for some extra comforters and grabbed the Chinese Checkerboard for entertainment. No TV, no heat and the nice mountain air made it feel like proper camping. After one game we were all too cold to continue so Doug and I went to our room with some cards. The coldness quickly took over our want to play cards so we cuddled under the two heavy comforters. Since it was too early to go to sleep, we decided to play 20 Questions. Two and a half hours and lots of guessing later we fell asleep. We ate breakfast at the hostel: noodles, eggs, rice porridge and a steamed roll. We left for our 4 hour hike overlooking more wonderful scenery.

At one point we got a bit tired so we shelled out $3 to get a ride on some bamboo chairs. We felt like kings and queens in a caravan! It was a little scary because they walked pretty fast and we were going up and down and up and down stairs. The shocks on bamboo poles are actually pretty good though!

We spent another full day in park and had an amazing time. We were some of the only foreigners in the whole park which was really quite an adventure trying to get around. Such a good thing I have Doug and his Chinese speaking skills! Since we had hiked on top of these mountains, now we had to get down. So, of course, we took a giant elevator. They claim it’s the largest outdoor elevator in the world, or something. It was huge! We bid goodbye to the mountains and got on the bus to take us back to Zhangjiajie city.

We arrived safely back into the city, ate dinner and went shopping for the evening.  We stayed in other hostel that put us out another $5.22, but this time it had a heater! We woke up early to catch our bus back to Xiangtan. I think we all had a fantastic adventure to “Pandora”.