Day 180: Zhangjiajie – Day 2
Lindsay (strongly) insisted I write a guest post.
Last time I wrote something that wasn’t code was in college, so I’m a bit rusty. Apologies in advance 🙂
So here’s all the wonderful things Lindsay missed:
After a strenuous hike of about 3 hours to a mountain top we skipped the day before….
…I emerge at the top a sweaty, tired mess. Besides beautiful scenery during the ascent, I was “rewarded” with a sea of selfie snapping tourists at the top who arrived by tram/cable car/elevator. They swarmed me for group photos as if I was Brad Pitt fresh off a divorce press release. I contemplated setting up a stand and charging 10 yuan per photo; surely it would be way more lucrative than my former career! but alas, I had more park to cover.
After 15 minutes of trying to do the penguin shuffle to “enjoy nature” with thousands of others (and resisting the very strong urge to jump off a cliff to make it stop — good thing there are signs… )
I saw the one person that would make it all OK. That would make the entire crowd fade away a distant memory. That would make Lindsay wish so much she was with me. He appeared high above the crowd, smiling at me with his long white flowing beard, with a halo of white and red lighting the way. Yep, you guessed it — it was the Colonel Sanders, and yes, the Chinese let us build a KFC at the top of their beloved national park. I bet if Trump privatized our parks, we’d have something similar at the top of Grand Canyon. With a “beautiful” Trump branded elevator 🙂
I won’t disclose whether I ate there or not — but let’s just say the other options in the park were limited:
Seriously, what is that? pigeon chicks? What ever happened to General Tso’s chicken or sweet & sour pork??
Anyway, back to the park. Chinese have an interesting approach to nature conservation — they litter their parks with (dare I say it, tacky) escalators, elevators, bridges, ‘glass’ walkways, trams, cable cars, and tourist shops. It’s really more of an amusement park vs. a natural landscape. Different strokes for different folks I guess, certainly not my (or Lindsay’s) cup of tea.
I did, however, cave and ride the “world’s largest outdoor glass elevator” (Lindsay refused on the first day due to the hefty $10 price tag); Luckily she wasn’t there to reel me in, and by golly, sometimes, you just gotta treat yo’ self 🙂 I got lucky — there was zero line, and in no-time I was whisked away in an elevator crammed with 15 tourists to the top of the mountain. Lucky for me, everyone in my elevator was incredibly short, so even though I was crammed in the middle of a heap of tourists, I had a lovely unobstructed view. The 3 minutes of Oooh’s and Ahhh’s from the other tourists were so intense, I thought we might be watching the moon landing for the very first time. Either that or they were having an intense 3-minute long orgasm. Either way, I thought the experience was just OK, certainly not worth standing in line for and not “Oooh/Ahhh” worthy.
As much fun as I was having, I did miss my dear wife, and was thrilled to reunite with her outside the park gate promptly at 5:30pm for our onward journey to Zhangjiajie city!