Zhangjiajie, where your face is the ticket

Day oneBailong Elevator

A park that already knows your face

The train from Chongqing got in late, so our first night in Zhangjiajie was a quick barbecue at the place next door and straight to bed. We wanted to be at the entrance of the Forest Park at seven the next morning, which was easy enough with the hotel only a few minutes from the gate.

What we hadn’t expected was that nobody would ever ask us for a ticket. At the entrance, and then at every checkpoint, bus and lift after that, a camera scanned our faces and let us through, which felt a little crazy and was also extremely efficient. The whole park worked like that. The buses were endless, quick and on time, and there were hardly any queues, even though everything we’d read warned that August meant hours of waiting and a view of other people’s heads.

We started at the Bailong Elevator, a glass lift built into the side of one of the mountains, and the ride up was enough to see that everyone who’d praised these mountains had been underselling them. They look as if someone had pushed thousands of giant pencils into the ground and walked off, and at the top every viewpoint seemed to be competing with the one before.

There are four mountain areas in the park. We’d love to give you their names, but by the time we sat down to write this we couldn’t remember them and one of us was confidently including a mountain that isn’t even inside the park. On that first day we took a bus across a plateau and walked a three-hour loop, and although it turned out to be the busiest of our three days, it was still far quieter than we’d been warned.

Lunch came from the supermarket next to the hotel, one of those boxed meals that cook themselves. You pour the water from the pack onto a chemical bag, which gets alarmingly hot, stack the plastic trays on top and wait fifteen minutes while the steam turns dry rice into actual rice. We did it on a bench halfway along the trail, and plenty of people walked past smiling at us, as if we were part of the attraction.

Later a family stopped to chat, and the woman turned out to know a bit of Spanish. They took a lovely photo of the two of us, and then we caught them taking a few more of us on their own camera, a serious professional one. Further on we watched them do exactly the same with another Western couple. Our working theory is that somewhere in China there’s a family album of foreigners, and we’re in it.

It was the longest and hardest walk of the stay, with steel ladders in places and a staircase carved between two boulders so huge they felt like walls, so narrow that some people couldn’t get through at all and the rest of us went up sideways with our backpacks off, which was great fun.

The one real mistake of the day came at the end, when we took a cable car down to a different entrance and found out at the bottom that there was no shuttle back to ours, only a taxi ride of about sixty kilometres round the mountain. So we rode the cable car straight back up and undid the whole route one shuttle bus at a time, watching the clock, and got back to the Bailong Elevator just in time. At least we got the views from the cable car twice.

At the bottom, finally, were the monkeys we’d been promised since the morning. At first we thought everyone was filming the mountain we’d just come down. Then we noticed the macaques eating whatever people gave them, and the Chinese tourists walking right up to touch them, even though a few of the monkeys were making it clear they’d rather not be touched.

Night oneBy the river

Wait a minute

That night there was a drone show over the river for what we think was an army anniversary, with flags, a map of military positions and, according to one of us, guns (the other never saw any). The promenade along the water was full of things far bigger than they needed to be, a giant fake garden, a giant figure, mushrooms, glitter.

We had our first beer in China at a restaurant we’d walked past earlier, with something from a boiling pot that sat halfway between a soup and a very runny risotto, which is why we needed a spoon. The waitress, who spoke no English, understood straight away, put both hands to her mouth as if she were searching every drawer in the building in her head, said wait a minute, and then took off sideways across the restaurant at full speed. Neither of us saw that coming, and it made our evening.

Day twoA smaller mountain

The path nobody uses

The next morning we were up early again on a smaller mountain, possibly Tianzi, where several routes were closed, so we did a short half loop and came down on a path that hardly anyone seemed to use any more. Plants had grown over the steps, the stones were slippery with green algae, the insects sounded like a building site, and the worms, snails and beetles were the biggest either of us had ever seen. By the time we reached the bottom it was late and a thunderstorm was on its way.

Franzi went back to rest after two long days, while Fernando, who somehow still had energy, walked the Ten Mile Gallery, a path along the train tracks that shows you the mountains from below. Later the rain caught us both in the forecourt of a temple by the river, and we waited it out there without ever going inside.

Don’t come expecting a normal mountain hike. It’s wooden walkways almost everywhere, completely set up for tourists, with shops at the top. A bit ugly, and very handy. Fernando

Day threeGolden Whip Stream

Where the monkeys are

On our last day in the park we stayed low, on the Golden Whip Stream, a flat, well-kept path along the valley floor between the pencils, and it turned out to be full of monkeys. They were helping themselves to people’s crisps. One climbed onto an electrical box and rocked it back and forth with its own weight, then launched itself into the trees and at anyone nearby. We were starving, but the fresh food in our bags stayed there the whole way, because we’d seen what happened to everyone who opened theirs.

At the end there was a river where a few people were looking for gold, all of them under five. From there a bus and one more cable car took us up for a last two or three hour loop in cloud and rain, which we didn’t mind at all after the clear days we’d already had. There were whole villages and temples up there, and more monkeys.

With the fog it looked like a fairy-tale land, the mountains appearing and disappearing as if we were up in the sky. That was the day it looked most like Avatar. Franzi

LeavingZhangjiajie city

Cheap for a reason

After three days in the park we moved to a hotel in the city, one of the cheapest bookings of the trip so far, and it was cheap for a reason. The room was at street level right beside reception, the walls stopped no sound at all, and in the tiny bathroom the toilet was a hole in the floor with the shower directly above it, which is at least an efficient use of space.

We’d planned to do Tianmen Mountain the next day, until we saw that the entrance and cable car together cost about as much as our three days in the main park, and with fog and rain as well we skipped it and wandered around the city instead. When the taxi to Furong turned up and the driver wanted us to pay his tolls in both directions, we took the train.

If you goOur notes

What we’d tell a friend

Nothing official, just what four days taught us, some of it the hard way.

Get to the gate early. We were in at seven and, even in August, barely queued.
You don’t need a ticket on you: the park scans your face at the gate, on the buses and at the lifts.
Buy a self-heating meal in a supermarket in town and have lunch on a bench. It takes fifteen minutes.
Before taking a cable car down to another entrance, check there’s a shuttle back to yours. The taxi round is about sixty kilometres.
Keep food out of sight on the Golden Whip Stream. The monkeys don’t ask.
Don’t expect wild trails. The main routes are wooden walkways, with shops.
Don’t write off a foggy day. Ours looked the most like the film.
Tianmen Mountain is outside the park and costs about as much as three days inside it.