Towers of stone

Our visit to the Zhangjiajie park went well, especially since we had only one day there. The park is big, so many people spend two or three days there.

We left Changsha on the first slow train we've ridden on this trip. We had "hard seats", but they had padding and ruffled seat covers. The seats faced each other, with a little table between them, so we were close to our neighbors. The ride took longer than scheduled and when we arrived at Zhangjiajie City we had to find out where to catch the bus to Wulingyuan, the tourist town at one of the entrances to the park. Once there, we walked to our hotel, which, of course, was placed wrong on the map from Booking.com.

The park ticket windows opened at seven and we were in line at 6:40. After a mad rush to the ticket window we took a bus for twenty minutes to get a cable car up the mountain. At the top, we rode on another bus for a few minutes to where we walked on paved paths to view the scenery. Absolutely breathtaking.

We went to a couple of other sites within the park, the second of which has rock towers named Avatar floating mountains, after the Avatar movie. The Hallelujah Mountains in the film were inspired by those in Zhangjiajie. The spires are spectacular - hundreds of feet tall. We saw a couple of monkeys, too.

Now we're going back to Changsha, where we will spend the night before heading to our last city, Guilin. The last, of course, except for Beijing, because we will fly back to the States from there.