Tianmen Mountain

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We had a few hours to kill back in Zhangjiajie before our midnight flight to Xi'an so we decided to book into a super cheap hotel near the bus station so we could dump our bags and spend the afternoon in the Tianmen Mountain Forest Park. There were three pretty cool things about this forest park. Firstly your ticket includes a ride up or down the longest cable car in Asia. At the top there were a number of precarious wooden and glass (!) walkways with spectacular views down! And thirdly you could get up close to Tianmen Dong a massive hole in the mountain range that was visible from town.

Everything was going to plan. Our bus from Fenghuang had left on time and had been entertaining since the bus host burst out into song after speaking solidly for about one hour. It was hilarious and we had to try so hard not to burst out laughing. Everyone else on the bus thought he was great. We'd walked the five minute to the hotel and they'd let us check in early (quite common in China). The sun was shining so all that was left was to get tickets for the National Park. And that's where the plan fell down. It was Sunday which meant it was super busy and we didn't get to the ticket office until 1.30 as we'd spent the morning travelling from Fenghuang. By this point most of the tickets had sold out so we had the option of taking the cable car up and the bus down, but not until 16.30. Or we could miss out the cable car and take the bus up and down the mountain and have more time up the mountain.

We went for the second option because we really wanted to see the glass walkways and we'd also expected to get a discount on the extortionate £30 per person entrance fee. We didn't. Instead we got to ride up and down the impressive mountain road, with 99 bends (switchbacks).

The bus ride up was impressive if a little scary with sheer drops (and no barriers), tight switch backs and of course a bus driver who thought he was in the Grand Prix. It was so funny listening to the squeals from everyone each time the bus went around a switch back.

The bus dropped us off at Tianmen Dong from where we had to catch two escalators to the mountain top. The two escalators turned out to be two sets of ten escalators that took forever. We didn't make it to the top of the mountain until 3pm and were worried we would run out of time. So we prioritised and headed straight to the newest glass walkway, the Dragon Coil, but the walk way to get there was packed and so we had to shuffle along in the crowds of people whilst trying not to get annoyed at the old ladies pushing and prodding you to go faster.

We got our tickets for the glass walkways and joined a massive queue of people. The queue jumping here was the worst we've seen and the way people were pushing was just unbelievable. We were behind two very old, frail people and they were getting pushed around as they tried to walk down the steps. It simply wasn't safe.

Of course the glass walkway was even busier - there were way too many people on it at the same time and most of them just wanted to get across it as quickly as possibly so there was even more pushing and shoving. I had been quite nervous about it but the rudeness of the people around us just totally detracted from the experience. It turned out to be such a disappointment.

We figured that maybe one of the other two glass walkways would be quieter as they weren't as new and so not as long, so we walked as fast as we could to the east walkway. Again we were gridlocked in the crowds so this hindered our progress but once we got past the turn for the cable car we started to lose people and finally had a bit of peace and quiet. We got all excited that our plan was going to work especially as we couldn't see anyone on the glass walkway as we approached. It turned out it was closed for maintenance - we were gutted! There was no time left to make it to the third glass walkway so we decided to walk back the way we'd come and take it the views we'd legged it past.

I think on a different day, starting out much earlier, this could have been a very different experience. But for us it was over priced, over crowded and massively over rated. Setting aside the crowds, the disappointment of missing out on the cable car and the awful glass walkway experience, the views were not a patch on those from Zhangjiajie National Park. We'd had our first dud day in China and it seemed like such a waste of a lovely sunny day.

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Comments

[Mum M]

Hello again
This is the 3rd attempt!!! Have a good journey and a brilliant time in Indonesia. Hope you manage some R and R after your hectic trip to China. Loads of love. xxx

[Sharon Tomasi]

Same here in SE Asia
We have run into the Chinese shoving and pushing and queue-jumping problem in a few places in SE Asia. Chinese crowds really know how to ruin a place! But the scenery looked amazing!