Advertisement
Lunch in Wuchang
A delicious Wuchang-style fish. Day 1: The original plan for our first week of summer was to spend it in the seaside city of Qingdao, enjoying the beaches and a few fresh beers from the brewery. Unfortunately our finals week left us so bogged down with work that we were unable to get tickets purchased, and everything sold out. We didn’t find this out until our bags were packed and we had taken the hour and twenty minute bus ride to Changzhou North Station on Friday. We ended up travelling back to the main train station and purchasing tickets for the following morning to Wuhan (our third choice… Xiamen was also sold out).
Day 2: Our early morning train ride to Wuhan took us through Anhui Province and into Hubei. We were almost late for the train, and had to ditch the bus, grab a taxi and sprint with our VERY heavy bags. We finally arrived in Wuhan Station just before 1pm and took a bus over the Yangtze to Hankou district. Our taxi driver drove us in circles saying he didn’t know our hotel. We finally got out, went and discovered the hotel had closed. We decided to try our first
Memorial for Communist Martyrs
Beautiful park in the center of Changsha city local Chinese hotel. Not bad! We settled in, dropped the bags and then headed down some back streets until we came across a delicious restaurant. We ordered several dishes and besides the tea, the highlights were the braised pork with preserved vegetables and a tofu skin dish that vaguely resembled a quesadilla. Later, we wandered down to the waterfront to be greeted with an amazing display of lights and general celebration. People were lighting lanterns and sending them off soaring into the sky. The streets were filled with people enjoying the beautiful summer evening hanging out on the shores of one of the largest rivers in the world. The colonial architecture on the riverside was reminiscent of a smaller version of the bund in Shanghai. We walked around a little more before calling it a night.
Day 3: We woke up and headed to the train ticket office to buy our tickets to Changsha. Once this was done, we went back on a little photo journey to capture some of the images we had seen the day before. Unfortunately we didn’t get any of the previous night. We ended up carrying our bags with us, and this
Photo 4
Lauren and I in Wulingyuan Park coupled with the extremely oppressive heat and humidity led to extreme exhaustion on our parts. I need to repeat… our bags were HEAVY. We then headed over to the Wuchang district of the city where we walked around enjoying the relaxed feel of the city before sitting down to a long and delicious meal along with a well-deserved cold beer. We had a wonderful sour and spicy potato dish, Wuchang-styled whole fish, and some excellent fried rice. Afterwards, we headed over to the Yellow Crane temple area. We had a quick peak, but were more interested in just tooling around town. We ended up cabbing it up to the station, passing by some very pretty areas in the city. The ride to Changsha took us a mere 1.5 hours through some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ve ever seen. The area is covered in rice paddies and small picturesque villages surrounded by greenery so lush I can’t really describe. When we got to Changsha we went to our hostel before going to the WORST dinner I’ve had in China. We had this place written in a guide book… the food was VERY expensive, overcooked, frozen… generally disgusting.
Photo 5
Beautiful karst pillars rising out of Wulingyuan park Day 4: Went to the bus station to get tickets out to Zhangjiajie city. Afterwards, we spent a couple hours enjoying Changsha. It is without a doubt the cleanest, nicest looking city I’ve seen in China. There isn’t a whole lot of tourism, but the quality of life seems quite high. The city’s central park was crazy beautiful. A tower commemorating communist martyrs overlooked a large lake filled with boats. There were ponds, pagodas, and stunning pathways. We then hurried over to the bus station to make our way west. The ride took longer than expected and we left late, so about 5.5 hours after boarding the bus, we arrived in Zhangjiajie city. We ate a simple but good meal next to the bus station before heading up to our hostel. The place was gorgeous… it had a rooftop garden, and a wonderfully inviting common area. After checking in, Lauren and I hit the streets to get to know the town a little bit. The city is very small by Chinese standards, but the people were very friendly, and we enjoyed walking down the small alleyways, watching the people enjoy their evenings eating and drinking on the street.
Day
Monkeys in the park
There were tons of monkeys in the park... they were stealing garbage from the garbage cans and making a mess! 5: We woke up and headed up to the Wulingyuan park area. We ended up going with a guy from Quebec who happened to be leaving the same time we did. We took a 40 minute bus ride up into the mountains to reach the park entrance. It was insanely beautiful. It almost looks like you’re on a different planet. The entrance fees were expensive, and they take your fingerprints to ensure you do not overstay your ticket at the park… a little weird. We spent the day hiking the many trails in the park, eventually climbing several thousand feet via stairs to get to some gorgeous outlooks. At the end of the evening we returned to the hostel and had the blandest meal I’ve had in a while. It was very disappointing after a long and extremely exhausting day. Our legs were all fairly shaky at this point.
Day 6: We got up in the morning to do one more hike. This time to a minority village set several thousand feet up into the cliffs. Some of the drop offs were scary steep. The paths were carved into the rocks and were hardly what I’d call safe (you have to buy insurance before entering the park.) We ended up crossing a wooden bridge over one of these huge drop offs (not easy for me as I’m a little nervous about heights) before then ascending a ladder with equally as steep drop offs on the sides. At the top, we reached a small point at the top of one of the karst pillars. Scary I’ll admit, but spectacular 360 degree views. After this, we had a nice lunch with Alex before saying our goodbyes and heading back down from the mountain. This is where our most epic traveling experience thus far starts. It took approximately an hour and a half via bus, 362 floor elevator carved into the cliffs, hiking, and taxi to get to the train station. Originally we were going to get a train to Yichang and see the Three Gorges Dam in the morning before heading home to Changzhou, but they did not have any trains that day. We went to the bus station and they also had no busses. We ended up bussing it back to Changsha for four hours, then buying train tickets for 10pm to Wuhan. We arrived in Wuhan at 2am, and had to cab it from one train station to another to catch our 4am train from Hankou Station in to Changzhou where we spent the next 8 plus hours. I should mention that these were on the old slow long distance trains. All the seats were sold out, so the seats were standing room only. We stood for the pretty much the entire 4 hour journey to Wuhan before Lauren found an open seat for the last part. One the way back to Changzhou, we found some space on the floor and set up some plastic bags to camp out and sleep. About 26 hours after starting out, we finally arrived back in Changzhou!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.057s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 14; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0307s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb