Owing to China's hilarious spat with Google, updating this
blog proved a challenge during the month I just spent in China. You must
forgive me for posting about a few items several weeks after they happened.
On Friday, January 16th I woke up to the most classic of
winter days in Beijing. It was foggy, polluted, freezing cold. Also, it was
very polluted. Despite 14 floors of vantage point I couldn't see the next
building over. It was time to escape. That night I boarded a flight to the city
once known as Dayong, in Hunan province. I say "once" because it's
now known as Zhangjiajie City. As will be discussed in the next post, there is
a terrible boringness to mid-size Chinese cities. Some have chosen to ignore
this problem, others have chosen to advertise their often-disputable merits
with ads that reduce your desire to actually go there (the 1980s-like
Powerpoint based commercial for a city in Guangdong comes to mind, as a city of
sea, of business, and of bad graphics), and the brain trust of Dayong chose to
rename the city after a famous neighbor, creating an enormous amount of
confusion for the dim-witted (like me) who are trying to book a hotel that's
not in their city, but in their famous neighbor.
Zhangjiajie City is named after the first national park in
China, Zhangjiajie, which is about 30 minutes north of the city. Now part of
the Wulingyuan National Scenic Area, it is certainly worthy of its heritage
status. The park is endlessly breathtaking. I took 300 photos while there, all
of them of rocks. I found I couldn't stop. But none of them do it justice. It
is simply astounding. At times it is like Yosemite, but more dramatic.
I started (after a very frigid evening) with a cable car up
to HuangShi, a town at the top of a karst formation. The view was shocking, but
I found that my afternoon along the streams of the park, through sudden canyons
and cliffs, was where the true nature of the park came alive. A second day,
going up an elevator to the top of a hill and coming down Tianji Mountain on a
5 mile staircase down led to another lovely walk along the streams of the park.
The third day I stopped being lazy and hiked on a little used path to the top
of a mountain only accessible by stairs (a rarity at a Chinese tourist
destination). It was delightful. January is the low season, it was a Monday,
and I had the park to myself. That is how the park should be enjoyed. It's
majesty declines as the number of loud tour groups increases. It was one of the
best weekends I've ever spent. I'm afraid the photos will never deliver the
same rude shock and peaceful refuge that the park gave to me.
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| Promptly Disregarding the Signs Not to Tease the Monkeys |
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| The delightful students from Nanjing with home I descended Tianji |
The next post will be about Harbin, another mid-sized
Chinese city which actually has a soul . . . stay tuned.
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