If you've seen the movie Avatar, you probably noticed the giant spikey mountains. Those weren't wholly rendered in 3d but shot in Zhangjiajie national park. And today we're visiting those mountains.
The day starts with an hour-long bus ride to the national park. You can see the entrance above. Once in the park, you have access to free busses that take you to certain areas. Other transportation means such as cable cars and elevators are not free.
We started by taking the bus to the elevator that takes you right to the top of one of these mountains.
From there, we wander around. Almost none of the signs are in English, and neither are the bus destination signs. We have no clue where we are or what direction to go. We did know that we paid a ton of money for the elevator, and we didn't want to pay it to get down, so the challenge of the day was to find our way back for free.
Eventually, we figured out that you had to get out of the bus, walk 100 meters to a different bus station and get on another bus there. (thanks, Google translate).
We got off at a random stop, and after a couple of meters of walking, we got more breathtaking views.
At this point, it was starting to get late, and we were still on top of a mountain with no idea how to get down. After asking around, it turned out the fastest way was to get down a hiking trail that would take an hour. It turned out it was actually a 3800 step-long set of stairs.
Eventually, we reached the bottom, and after flagging down a bus, we were finally on our way to the hotel.
