Thursday, November 24, 2011

Welcome to Pandora

This past weekend Mike and I went to Zhangjiajie. (J-ang-Jia-Gee)
A place the Chinese claim parts of Avatar was filmed.

Or at least that what we think this sign says...

It was super fun! After 7 hours on the bus Mike and I were glad to arrive in the city. There were loads of men with taxi's waiting outside the bus terminal, and normally these are exactly the type of taxi's you avoid.($$$) But as it was nearing the haunting hour...or midnight, we figured we'd better not take our chances. 
Once our taxi driver saw the address to where would be taking us, he just kept repeating, "Boo how, boo how!" which means "No good", But we had reservations, so he would be taking us there. Grudgingly he abliged and after arriving, and still ranting at how terrible our hostel would be, we paid him, and went up the elevator to the fourth floor to find a surprisingly cute little hostel. It kind of looked like a log cabin on the side of an aparment building. And! Our room had a duvet. How I miss duvets.

p.s. that's me moving at inhuman speed out of the picture


So after a glorious nights sleep in our duvet, we headed out to the Zhangjiajie National Park. 
Our first attraction was the Yellow Limestone Caves. Here's a video of the 3 hours in and around the caves. It was rather phenomenal.



I'm sorry about the quality of the movie, my internet won't let me upload anything bigger.


 Next we took a 7 minute cable car ride up to the rocks. It was pretty unbelievable up there.






Once up there, we explored around a bit, before taking the free bus to our hostel in the mountains. Here are some of the sights.




Really? Who thought,
"This is the perfect place to sell giant wooden eagles to tourists! On top of this mountain!"




This is what I pretended I looked like climbing all 100,000,000 of these steps...

...but this is what I really looked like.




Our classy little mountain hostel
At around 7pm we finally made it to our hostel in the mountains. 
After a day full of "mountain climbing" were we ever happy to be there.

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