Day 181: Zhangjiajie City – Tianmen Mountain
Our plan for the day was to visit Tianmen Mountain National Park – a 5,000ft high mountain featuring a distinctive “keyhole” opening on its highest peak and one of the world’s longest cable cars to the top. The hotel staff told us the cable car doesn’t start running until 8AM, so we headed down to the buffet breakfast around 7AM, before hailing a taxi to the park ticket office.
Waiting in line for the cable car up to the top of Tianmen Mountain – it’s just after 8AM, so the wait is very short
The 7KM cable car line is the longest in Asia and takes us half an hour to ride to the top. We snigger as one of the scared Chinese tourists holds onto the rail with white knuckles, but when the car started it’s steepest part of the ascent – 37⁰ angle with a good 4,000+ft drop – Lindsay started to get a little vertigo herself!
We have a foggy view of the surrounding peaks from the top of Tianmen Mountain
We have to wear protective covers for our couple of boots as we walk across one of two glass-bottom walkways that circumvent the cliffside
The view from the glass walkway is dizzying, as it is a straight 4,000+ft plunge to the bottom – no pushing!
A cement walkway plastered to the side of the cliff leads us around the mountain
We enter the appropriately named “Forest of Wishes,” where hundreds of thousands of visitors before us have tied red prayer ribbons to the surrounding trees and guardrails with their wishes written on them in Chinese. A nearby vendor is selling blank ribbons and markers nearby
We walk along the “complicated” landform, careful not to “drift” off the precipitously high walkway
We spot a rare break in the flow of tourists and take a few precious moments to admire the view from an empty bridge
Lindsay plays around in the “Bai He” – a wooden structure with moveable walls inside. It’s some sort of symbolic I-Ching art installation – whatever, it’s fun to turn the inside into a maze!
Lindsay tosses a pebble into the “Son Craving Cave” – hoping for twin girls!
Yu Hu Peak – more like, “YA HOO!” peak – just like in the other parks in China, the local tourists like to scream at the top of Tianmen Mountain to hear fellow travellers echo their call
View of Tianmen Mountain from Yu Hu Peak
Descending from Tianmen peak via a series of about a dozen escalators hidden inside the mountain
Hundreds of “locks of love” adorn a giant lock at the base of the “keyhole” opening of Tianmen Mountain. We walk down a very steep stone stair to the beginning of the road, where we will catch the bus down to the city
An incense-burning altar contributes to the hazy atmosphere at the keyhole viewpoint on Tianmen Mountain
We catch the bus back to the city – even though it’s only 11KM, it takes us a little over an hour to traverse the 99 hairpin turns down the mountain
We are starving by the time we get back to the city, and the humid heat is making us way too cranky to search for food. Without a second thought, we march into the air-conditioned McDonalds and pig out on fast food. We catch eyes with half a dozen fellow Westerners and the thought crosses our minds: “So…China has defeated you, too?”
Once our bellies were full of burgers, we got a second wind and decided to find a grocery store to stock up on snacks and pick up something to bring back to the hotel for dinner. We spent the rest of the afternoon hiding in our air-conditioned Best Western, uploading photos and writing blog entries.
Pairing our second bottle of Chinese wine with hard-boiled eggs, bread and bananas – real gourmands, we are. Unfortunately for us, the Best Western doesn’t have any English-language channels, so we watch one of our remaining “Continuum” episodes that Igor downloaded before we left the USA