Day 65: Zhangjiajie(張家界)

Base of Zhangjiajie (張家界) Park
This morning we took a bus an hour outside of the city to the park.  Since school is now back in session in China, the number of other tourists dropped by about 80% and you could tell this immediately.  Instead of a mob of 20+ Chinese tours trying to get in we only saw about 1 at a time with a lot of distance between tours.

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Park entrance empty of any Chinese tours

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Entrance to the park

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Hard to see, but if you put anything in the "non-recyclable" side there was a slope that made it fall to the "recyclable" side

 The bottom of this park was a nice walk along a river under a lot of trees, when you did see an opening in the trees you could see huge rock formations coming out of seemingly nowhere.  In addition there were a lot of monkeys on this trail that the chinese tourists would feed.  I mean what else are you supposed to do when the posted signs tell you specifically not to feed the monkeys.

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Walk along the river

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Sorry for the blurry picture, but wanted to show how to get monkey's attention if they arent posing for pictures, hit the branch with a walking stick

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Charlotte having a staring competition with a monkey

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Lazy monkey

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View between the trees of the rock formations

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Climbing to the top
I normally like hiking whether its on a forest path or even a man made sidewalk with stairs like at Yellow Mountain, but today's hike was not fun at all and was made even worse by the fact that we hadn't really recovered from Yellow Mountain 2 days ago.  This hike was under heavy forest brush so you couldn't see anything except the trees around you and was just a never ending sets of concrete stairs.  With nothing to look at, all you could concentrate on is how your legs were in pain.

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All you can see is stairs

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Took a break from climbing to be a part of a family portrait

The top of the mountain
We had heard amazing things about this park and throughout the park they have posters reminding you that this was the inspiration for the scenery in Avatar.  They even tell you that even though James Cameron said that Yellow Mountain was the inspiration, he was wrong and it is actually this park.  They even have pictures of the mountainous islands and compare them with the rock formations and make a very good argument as the trees on the rocks line up almost exactly between the two.  When we got to the top we couldn't wait to see it.  While we did get to see them, some haze was blocking about 50% of the view, then as the day wore on fog rolled in and you could only see the rocks that were directly in front of you.

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Avatar information

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You can really see the haze

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They had a turtle pond, next to it you could buy a turtle in a cage, engrave your name on the shell and set it free for good luck in the pond

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This was called "The greatest bridge in the world", which is a natural bridge about 20m long and 1.5-3m wide connecting two independent rocks, hanging about 350m in the air.  it is actually named by an American traveler in the 80s.  Tourists are able to walk across the bridge to get to the other rock.

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A night on the mountain
We decided it would be easiest to stay on top of the mountain where different families rent out their guest rooms for about $9 each, knowing it would be probably pretty bad conditions we didnt even bring anything to shower because we knew it would be really dirty and we were pretty much right.  The family cooked a cheap dinner and we went to sleep by around 8:30 because there wasnt much else to do on top of a mountain and we wanted to wake up early for sunrise.

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The house we stayed at

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Inside the room

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Bathroom

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The family that owned the house

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Dinner outside