After we got from the wedding we headed to Zhangjiajie city, and the Wulingyan Scenic Area / the national park. The views there were absolutely amazing! It's said that the park was the inspiration for the beautiful Pandora planet in the James Cameron movie Avatar. We got a lot of good pictures (check out our picture gallery), some of them will find their way to a printer when we get back to Finland. The arrival day we spent in the village next to the park. Suoxiyu was a traditional Chinese village, quite similar to Swiss mountain villages. Poor people everywhere trying to sell all kinds of weird Avatar / Wulingyan related souvenirs, like 3D hologram mouse pads.

Otherwise the town was very silent and pleasant in the daytime ( All the domestic tourists were inside the park). After wandering around we found the main street and it was surprisingly busy. There we found a very decent bakery with first class coffee! Coffee is so hard to find in China, that we could make an entire blog post about it. We saw a beautiful picture of a nicely lit idyllic village in some brochure. Outside it looked beautiful but inside was like a rotten apple: a part of town which was entirely built for tourists. There were empty clubs playing loud music, souvenir shops with amazing prices and the shops continued to infinity and a lot of bored workers with nothing to do.

The first park morning we didn't wake up to our alarm clock. We woke up to the noise made by the hasty, but highly organized Chinese tourists at 6:30 AM. Jussi went outside to see and the amount of the tourists was unimaginable, truly jaw-dropping. We went for the breakfast about 8:45 and it was also very amazing. There was nothing to eat anymore. The breakfast only served to 8:30. Chinese efficiency left us speechless (and foodless).

Inside the park; we were prepared to walk long distances. But after entering we realized that like everywhere, the Chinese way of doing things is very controlled: only limited areas were accessible by walking and busses drove people from viewplace to another.

First thing we did in the park was riding the cableway up to the mountain. About one km high the air temperature was about 18C, very cold after Guangzhou's over 30 degrees. (For the next day we found some clothes from the town). Views were unbelievable and like from a fairytale. After we studied our maps throughout we finally found a route we could walk down from the mountain. It was quite a trip: own pace, not so many tourists, beautiful landscapes and thousands of steps.

The second day we were clever. We checked out with our stuff and drove a taxi around the area to a another entrance with a completely new kind of views. The mist turned into fog, and top of the mountain it felt more like rain. The Sunday it was, and the tourists were almost non-existent.

The real downside of the park was that when going just a few meters off road in the viewing spots or resting places, there could be found huge piles of waste thrown into the hillsides. And not just of tourists but big sacks of garbage from the trash bins in the park. Sad to see such a beautiful place to be treated that way. Chinese should be educated about the wasting and pollution, but what can you do if they are used to throw things away just like that. And for the tourists, they are on their vacation, right?

Our train home went a little different route than the first one and our journey back home took almost 17 hours. The most exhausting train we have ever been in. We bought the tickets from a travel agency on the HEMC island, from a lady whose English wasn't that good. Our advice is to check that you have seat numbers in your tickets, otherwise you could end up searching for the last places available to sleep or sit: the Chinese way to travel in a train during popular times is to book the trains almost as full as the buses are in the downtown area. Some Chinese had to sit on the floor the whole 17h.