Zhangjiajie

Zhangjiajie (we're still not 100% on the pronunciation) is most famous for its mountainous national parks. After a lot of time in Chinese cities, this was our chance to see some of the country's natural beauty... in theory. It has been a mixed bag!

There is one budget hikers’ inn in Zhangjiajie, fortunately run by the only English-speaking person in a 200km radius. It meant we were staying with more white tourists in Zhangjiajie than anywhere else in China so far (bizarrely, mostly Italians). Host Carol gave us excellent advice for how to get the best out of the park while avoiding the worst of the crowds. We woke up early all three mornings to steal a march, and took a series of buses, cable cars, and steep stairs to explore the Wulingyuan area. The park features the towering sandstone stacks that are most famous as the backdrop for the Avatar film. The stacks are extraordinary, with some precariously balanced like Jenga towers, and others smoothly striated like the shaved sides of a döner kebab spit. Some of them echo when you shout across the valley, which was justification for domestic visitors to indulge in bellowing and screaming into the void at top volume. Curiously, they kept screaming everywhere else in the park too—perhaps hoping for more echo opportunities?

There are hundreds of viewpoints along the walkways, all of which follow the Chinese hyperbolic naming tradition. '#1 Heavenly Jade Cloud Bridge of General Zhang Inspecting his Magnificent Turtles' or 'Fascinating Golden Platform where Imperial Dragon Reaches Towards the Gods', etc. Dan was absolutely furious because all the maps in the park change orientation at each new location and are consistently mislabelled. Plus, the 'You are here' marker is always rubbed off because so many people have touched it, making it almost impossible to work out where you are. "I may be a Humanities student, but even I know it's cartographically unjustifiable," he raged. This led us, at one point, to take a "shortcut" which actually involved climbing up 1.5 hours of unbroken steps... a sweaty endeavour.

Our last day, we woke at 5am to catch the world's longest cable car (7km!) up Tianmen Mountain, the most popular spot in Zhangjiajie. The clouds gave us an incredible swirling view on the way up, although it was unfortunately too foggy to see anything more than 20m away once we were on the plateau. A nightmare for domestic tourists... what are they meant to photograph? We saw a lot of forlorn Chinese taking pics of pure blank fog, and wondered what they were hoping for. Tianmen is also home to the 999-step staircase to the Gate of Heaven, which we bravely completed. 999 steps sounds like a lot, and after a 5am alarm, it bloody felt like it too. And we couldn't even see the ‘gate’ at the top. Bit of a bummer, but assuaged by our smugness for completing it.

Some reflections on Chinese domestic tourism so far. Chinese cities are exciting: big crowds, loud noise, structured activities, focus on convenience and minimal effort... these things make the cities vibrant, intense, efficient and full of life. But the same things become disadvantages when you visit somewhere that ought to be serene and natural. Zhangjiajie is very busy, with food and souvenir stalls everywhere, heavily curated walkways, lots of cable cars and escalators, and blatant disregard for animal welfare: signs telling people not to feed the monkeys or pick up baby turtles are universally ignored. You can hire a drone and VR headset, or ride a simulator, to imagine what it must be like to be right there at the mountains (despite being right there at the mountains). There are a lot of bins and litter pickers around, but still plenty of trash near the pathways. Tour guides with loudspeakers screech at their groups, who block the paths and force you to push past unless you want to walk at negative km/h. If you are unlucky enough to be going in the same direction as them at the same time, you can end up queuing for hours just to ride a 2-minute elevator. We are abandoning British manners out of necessity, pushing past slow walkers and shoulder checking kids who try to cut into queues ahead of us. No one appears to mind getting shoved. Live by the sword, etc.

This is all the inevitable consequence of having an easily-accessible, world-class landmark in a country of 1.4 billion people. It really is incredibly beautiful! And when you get a moment away from the phones, flags and crowds, you can appreciate just how monolithic the sights are. We can see why everyone wants to come, and why the government has spent so much time and money on the infrastructure to allow thousands of people to visit every day: the demand is high, and the scenery justifies it. We're glad we came, crowds notwithstanding—visiting overcrowded, consumerised landmarks is part of the Chinese experience anyway. Besides, if these same mountains were in Europe or the US, they'd be just as popular and overcrowded with Instagram tourists, so it's not an exclusively Chinese problem.

The question is, does having all this tightly-controlled infrastructure help to protect the park by keeping tourists contained, or turn it into a Disneyland and bastardise the natural beauty? Debate in the comments 😅 in the meantime, we're on our way to Hong Kong for an overdue anniversary meal!Baca lagi