Don't worry or go to the bathhouse! China-2017. Part 8. Planeta Pandora.
Wulingyuan 2017-06-02 Day 5
The main point of our route, that's exactly the central place around which all movements were built, was Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. This is the world-famous park where the Mount Hallelujah Avatar is located, around which Jake Sully flew on his Toruk. There are several versions about the filming of this park for the film, the main one of which says that nothing was filmed here, but for the film Avatar these mountains were simply painted. But the fact remains - these are the mountains. And in any case, even if stones fell from the sky, we would go to see this park.
When we woke up, the stones were not falling. It was raining. The mountains were drowned in mist. What a trifle!
We had breakfast, which God sent, gathered without haste and handed over the suitcases to the “pigeon mail”. Between the hotels in Wulingyuan and Zhangjiajie there is a kind of luggage delivery service, 20 yuan for one piece of luggage. In the morning, tell your hotel where to deliver and by the evening you will find your things in the hotel where you sent them. What could be more convenient? It's just a pity that further - to Furong or Fenghuang, you can't do the same)
We take in backpacks only the most necessary things - raincoats, a power bank, some water and a panama hat. Raincoats didn't come in handy, the rain remained in Zhangjiajie, and the rest was most welcome.
The golden man The owner hands us a map, on which he marks places of interest to tourists, takes us to the bus station and puts us on a bus to Wulingyuan.
We drive for quite a long time, anxiously watching the clouds of fog wrapping the mountain peaks. Fall down mist, fall down!
They say that during the fog in the park you can’t see anything at all, but there is a very special fog - when milk falls at the foot of the mountains, and the peaks float in it like real flying mountains, and then we can say that an idiot’s dream came true and you visited Pandora. But, of course, we couldn’t have been so lucky) While we climbed the mountains, a bright and hot sun happened, sweat flooded our eyes, our legs refused to walk (after yesterday! ), And our eyes did not want to admire the incredible landscapes, they wanted to sleep .
But, let's go in order.
At the bus station in Wulingyuan, we take a taxi for 10 yuan and drive to the entrance to the park. The distance is quite small, but we feel sorry for more time than money. Taxi drops off far from the entrance, then everyone goes on foot.
We take tickets, there are practically no queues at the box office, the cashiers speak English. A passport is not needed here, but fingerprints will be taken at the entrance (I’ve read about this a hundred times, but I don’t remember at all how it happened, I speak from other people’s words). We pass through the turnstiles and get into the queue for the bus.
Buses take you to the Tianji lift and to other parts of the park (for example, to the elevator). The main thing is to get in the right queue when landing. To do this, we compare the hieroglyphs on the bus and in our Talmud.
Everything you want to go to has a name. You can perfectly know what it is called and pronounce it almost without hesitation, but to get there for sure, you need to print this name in hieroglyphs on paper. And preferably larger than ordinary letters. And even better, that is, in general, it is extremely good to recognize these hieroglyphs "by sight".
We need to get to the Tianji cable car. There are the most people on this bus, the queue moves quickly.
We land on a small square and further, right inside the shopping arcade of a small market, we pass to the stairs. I groan and climb the stairs. High. Hard.
But this is only the beginning. China pleased and delighted me with stairs until my legs refused to walk at all. This sadness is still far away, you need to go and drive more than one hundred kilometers, but for now I cowardly lie down to die on each flight and start thinking about how I can start going down, it’s impossible so many steps... But suddenly everything ends, we sit in the lift .
The booths are large, three or four Chinese are traveling with us. This deprives the trip of some charm, but it does not prevent us from taking pictures.
Well, how does it not interfere... )) the bottom of the photo can be cropped)
In general, I love cable cars, and especially in places like this!
Then again you need to go by bus. This is a short route, it only goes to McDonald's. And that's exactly where we need to go, there are wonderful observation decks of the Emperor's Platform. Tianzi Guangjingthai. Tien - Sky (rather even Tien), Zi - son. That is, Tianzi is the Son of Heaven, the emperor. Guangjingthai - an observation deck, you can forget it right away)
We go to McDonald's. Empty. Not a single person at all. We order a cola with ice. We are waiting 5 minutes. Probably making ice. Or run after him to the nearest glacier.
We sit for a long time on the street at a table, sip cola and are not in a hurry to go anywhere. Ahead of the whole day, and we sit well)
In general, Nadia taught me to sit still and not rush anywhere. Here, now, stop a moment.
-Tanya, we are in China! - she said enthusiastically - we are in China!!
Oh yeah! We are in China, everything else is bullshit.
There are many viewing platforms in the Tianzi area, one of them is the very Platform of the Son of God, and which one, it’s hard for me to say) They are all beautiful!
There was a long queue for one of them right on the stairs. Queue to take a photo. I suspect this was the Platform.
We do not need to be photographed, we make our way to the front of the line, and the Chinese do not react to such impudence at all. What to take from these unreasonable laowai. We catch the moment when the people taking pictures change and take pictures of the landscape. Of course, standing and admiring in such a crowd will not work. The girl, whose turn just came up, waves at me affably, go take a picture, you are a non-Chinese miracle. I smile back at her. I'll just stand here on the bottom step, okay? )
There are many steps. This is not to say that the path is too tiring, and yet I quickly get tired of walking up and down. There are not enough viewing platforms with a place to sit. We settle down to rest on a stone bench. But looking at human backs is not very interesting. We go to the exit, buy a fruit glass, sit again, relax, enjoy the day.
- We're in China! We are in Avatar Park!
In the Park, everything is rather confusing and it is completely unclear in which direction to move. If even before the Tianji area the bus carries itself, you won’t miss, then what to do next had to be thought out in advance. In preparation, I shoveled a lot of information and imagined a little how everything is arranged in this park, where to go, where to go, what to see.
I thought about different options for visiting Avatar Park, but in the end, I eliminated all the hard climbs and left only three must-see places. Well, something may be on the way, optional.
1. Platform of the Emperor.
2. Laouchang. (by taxi, otherwise it is very long and hard to go there, but from there the view of the elevator is generally beautiful))
3. Hallelujah Avatar
And, of course, I wanted to ride two lifts and a mountain lift.
1. Bailong Elevator (elevator stuck to the rock)
2. Tianji Lift (Wulingyuan Entrance)
3. Yangjiajie lift (Zhangjiajie village entrance)
I planned for all this for 1.5 days, so that in the remaining half a day I could still visit Baofeng Lake.
But, having walked up the stairs, we decide that the Avatar Park is, of course, very beautiful, but we won’t be able to manage one more day in the mountains. The steps will kill us. Therefore, Laouchang was missed, as was the Bailong elevator. So, we did not see the elevator from any side. Photo found on the Internet.
We find a bus stop that takes us to the Yuanjiajie area, where we will see Mount Hallelujah Avatar. We drive for quite a long time, sometimes huge territories dotted with sharp peaks flicker outside the window. But mostly the vegetation is too dense to see anything. The loudspeaker on the bus almost does not stop, all the time says goodbye to the passengers - Caijien. But, the bus, despite this, did not stop at any stop until it took us to Yuanqiajie)
The Yuanjiajie stop is no different from the Tianji stop - here is the bus, here is the shopping arcade. Except there's no McDonald's. We pass in the rows, I buy a mango in a glass. At the very bottom lies an old, already missing slice. Fu be like that)
Here, the views differ little, except that Hallelujah Avatar stands out.
All my photos of this mountain turned out to be smeared, I'm still a photographer) Therefore, I found a photo for you on the Internet
and Bridge #1.
All the same peaks, rocks - the Chinese mountains of the planet Pandora, beaten with smallpox for centuries.
Here they are, they exist.
A little imagination and you will fly among these rocks, even if the sun is shining and you can clearly see that the rocks stand firmly on their feet.
I'm even afraid to imagine what the feelings of those lucky ones who got here in the "correct" fog)
There are not enough viewing platforms, all the trees are bushes blocking the view. But going is interesting and not tiring.
In one place, red ribbons are full of. Nadya brought her ribbons, she gives it to me and we tie it too.
I think it's a temple. We did not find any building, but we saw the monks. Maybe these are burrow monks? ) Of course, I'm joking, if there were burrows here they would have been discovered long ago, they would have put up turnstiles at the entrance and would have taken crazy Chinese yuan for the entrance.
Suddenly we come across a lake with turtles.
The Chinese have fun throwing coins into the mouths of stone turtles. We join in the fun. Everyone misses, including me. And suddenly, Nadia deftly throws a coin into the turtle's mouth. I do not know what this means, I hope a lot of health, love and wealth, because the Chinese are very imbued with her accuracy. They smiled, gasped, said something, actively gesticulated and congratulated on the victory.
Probably in all Chinese parks there are places of increased adrenaline - glass paths, bridges, paths of fear and other bells and whistles that tickle your nerves. This park is no exception. A short but interesting bridge with a lattice instead of a floor makes me very happy. And although it is full of people, many prefer to walk along the iron, opaque part of it, and along the edges, where the most interesting thing is, it is completely free.
We decided to go down on the Yanjiajie cable car. To do this, you need to go back a little. We are looking for a bus in the direction we came from. And there we find delicious soup for little money and sit for a long time, have lunch. After dinner, I don’t feel like doing anything at all, I would like to lie down somewhere. I didn’t have enough sun loungers there) I like to walk and look for a short time and sit or lie down for a long time, soaking up the beauty.
We go towards the lift and still hope to see at least something. The road is forest, there are only trees around. At the fork, where those who go down on foot turn off, we understand that we can no longer go anywhere. There is nothing heavy, just fatigue has accumulated and the body needs to lie down. Probably, if we found where to rest, we would still walk and walk. It's only half past three on the clock.
There are porters in the bus stop area, I didn’t find out the cost, but those who are afraid to go to the Chinese mountains due to the severity of the climbs can take this feature into account. If you can't walk, they'll carry you)
As soon as we get into the booth, and we are traveling together, there are no volunteers at all, our fatigue disappears. There is simply stunning beauty all around! Probably, for those who have a lack of time, it is enough to ride the cable cars among the rocks to get an idea of the beauties. Of course, it's not cheap, but it's worth every penny.
Is it a waterfall or lens flare?
I want to capture all this in memory forever. Probably, I have never been to a more beautiful place.
I have an idea to climb Huangshi today, this is a separate mountain with many monkeys and a separate lift. But by the time we got there, the thought was gone. Things were moving towards evening, there were a couple of hours left before closing, it was scary to be late for the last bus. In addition, the brain wanted to change activities, contemplating the beauty turned out to be pleasant, but rather tiring)
We sit down in the park bus and go to some place, from where the descent down the stairs begins. There, my Mepsmee completely stopped taking a location.
The bus takes you down steeply, and there is space and fantastic landscapes around. Mountains overgrown with greenery and bizarre rocks among them. Tall bamboo stems, like huge ferns, bend under their own weight. It seems that you are on another planet.
Then we go up the stairs for a long time, around it is cool, dense forest.
A very pleasant walk, although no mountains are visible. The eye rests on the green. We are looking at trees. What is it? Not spruce or pine, but some conifer unknown to us.
Having descended, we are not even looking for a lift to Huangshi, we are looking for buses to Wulingyuan.
If all the buses in the park are free, then here the service is over, we are outside the park and you have to pay for the bus.
We come home from the bus station, by taxi, for 10 yuan, after the park I don’t feel like walking at all, my legs are buzzing. I want a massage, but Wulingyuan is famous for its massages. We go looking for a massage parlor, we find it very quickly, not far from our hostel.
The masseuses are bored, but no one has come down from the mountains except us) We are clarifying how much it costs, now I don’t remember whether it’s 65 or 85, I only remember that they threw us 6 yuan at the end.
We are offered to do a back right away, they explain the prices for a long time and that it will be better this way, but we choose only a foot massage and sit in chairs. Bring bowls of hot water. The water is very hot, please add cold water, they will add just a little to me, explaining that it should be hot.
A middle-aged woman does a massage for me, she does it normally, although it cannot be compared with a massage in a Beijing bath. But when the foot massage ends, it is taken for the shins. It hurts, I'm indignant, she offers to buy some kind of remedy, shows her thumb, they say, an excellent remedy. For a while I endure this "massage" with torture trying to steam me with an unknown liquid, then it presses too hard and I literally scream:
- Boo Sifu!
The woman understands that I am Tkhinbudon in the initial stage of enlightenment and it is a sin to be offended by me, she corrects me in a businesslike manner: “Bu shufu. ”
From excitement and pain, I confuse the words and instead of “unpleasantly” (Bu shufu) I pronounce “not a master”. As they say, a Freudian slip)
Further massage does not make sense, I'm angry, I don't buy anything, just like Nadia. The masseuse is upset, I thank her, I don’t swear, although I want to hit her. She saw that my legs were already bruised, and I asked to do it easier, but after her bruise massage, I also brought home. She tore my blood vessels. Wouldn't recommend this salon.
I pay, I try to find out why the extra 6 yuan, the answer with waving my hands does not clarify anything, I think what a miracle remedy, which they still smeared on one of our legs)
We leave to lick our wounds and look for fruit.
Right there, crossing the road, at the stall of a street vendor, we buy many different half-kilograms of fruit and have a party on the terrace of our hostel)
In China, everything is sold for half a kilo. Sometimes people do not know and swear with the sellers that they were not weighed enough.
In general, it is better not to go to China with your charter. China has a different planet and we are aliens for them. You need to understand one simple thing: if you love China, love the Chinese. Their culture, customs, mores, mentality - everything is different. Some things can annoy, some - even shock. The country is amazing and strange. She sinks into the soul. It's amazing. It is impossible to forget.
This is the country to which they return.
And tomorrow we were waiting for an early rise with a surprise. Don't switch! )
