Fenghuang

After Zhangjiajie, we split off into different directions: Jen's parents had to go to Beijing to meet up for a tour with their friends, Guili went to Xi'an to check out the Terracotta Warriors, and we decided to head to the ancient town of Fenghuang.  

Before we talk about Fenghuang, let us tell you about our journey there and how we ended up being escorted in a police vehicle...  

Wanting to play it safe (since we were going to Fenghuang on a weekend), we decided to book a hotel in advance.  The further you get from the big cities the harder it is to find people who know a bit of English, so, to be practical, we mapped out and took a picture of the hotel location, as well as its name & address in Chinese characters.  Going to Fenghuang was pretty easy - a noisy 5 hour bus ride - but once we arrived in the city, it became a bit more complicated...
Since we had the mapped location, we figured out where we were and set out in the direction of our hotel.  20 minutes of walking later, we reached the area where the hotel was suppose to be…. hmm.. no hotel.  
We asked several locals around the area, but between our 3 words of Chinese, their 5 words of English, and a whole lot of gestures/miming (which, interestingly enough, is not necessarily as universal as one might think!), no one seemed to be able to tell us where this hotel was.  One lady tried to tell us (on a map) that it was on the other side of town (where we just had arrived from), but then she pointed us in the opposite direction, so.. baffled, we discarded her advice.  
After thoroughly walking the area from both directions, we decided to give up and just take a taxi.  We waved 2 taxis down and, oddly, neither of them knew the location of the hotel either (or they were unwilling to take us to the address for some weird reason...??).  
Out of options, we spotted a police station and decided to ask them (with the hopes that they might speak some English).  We showed them our booking info and they invited us to have a seat.  After about 20 minutes of watching them speaking Mandarin to each other and smoking a few cigarettes (whilest we had no clue what was going on), one of the police officers suddenly stood up and said, "please... follow me".  
He took us out to a police car… and what do you know... they actually drove us all the way across town to our hotel, AND got out to escorted us on foot through the narrow alley until they successfully delivered us to the correct hotel location.. AND, they did all this with a smile and a friendly, "…Welcome to Fenghuang"!!  They were SO super nice!!  Thank you Fenghuang police!! :)

Anyhow....
The name "Fenghuang" is a Chinese Phoenix that is supposed to rule over all other birds.  It's also the name of a small city in the Hunan province where the old town is built around a small river and the original architecture is really well preserved.  Unfortunately, it rained for most of our time there.. but we did manage to enjoy one dry morning :)

 

The old town is lined with local handicrafts and food:  from dried fruit & ginger candy to dried pig face (which we did not dare try).  Most shops and restaurants stay open past 10PM so you can enjoy browsing and strolling through the old town well into the evening while the city is all lit up.

 

Another cool thing is that every night, the locals setup food stalls in the night market where you can choose from a variety of ingredients and have them prepare it for you.  Nothing is too "out there".. the weirdest thing is probably the little crabs and snails. The nice thing was that since they cooked BBQ style, there was a lot less oil that went into the preparation (relative to most of the other chinese food we'd been eating so far!!).  :)

 

So.. this is our last post from China!  We are next en route to Nepal!! :)

Zhangjiajie Mountain

As Dominic has said previously: "Jamais deux sans trois", so, we visited our 3rd set of mountains for this trip to China.  

Similar to Huangshan, the Zhangjiajie mountain claims to be part of the inspiration for James Cameron's movie "Avatar".  You could see a bit of resemblance in Huangshan, and you can definitely see it even more here…. the scenery is stunning.

The first day involved a LOT of stairs again (up and down)… Sharon did an amazing job keeping up!  We were all so proud of her - Good Job Mom!!  With the time crunch at the end, the stairs down really started to bare its weight on everyone's knees.  Mom got to test-drive the sedan chairs down that last little stretch :) 

On our second day we encountered a bit of rain but since we visited the valley, it didn't have a huge impact other than to provide some mystic mountain cloud scenery for us to enjoy.

We also encountered a few dozen monkeys…..they were a bit aggressive toward those who left their bags of food on the ground.

One last note about the visit: we are now tagged in the Chinese central database…. we had to give our thumbprints to the park in order to enter…..interesting.

 

Tianmen Mountain

From Huangshan, we headed to a place called Zhangjiajie City where we decided to first visit the local site, Tianmen Mountain.  What's impressive here is that the gondola actually starts inside the city and goes all the way to the top of the mountain.  Tourist publications claim that it's the longest passenger cableway of high mountains in the world (about 7.5km in length and 1.3km in elevation gain).

Once at the top, you can enjoy a nice walk along the mountain cliffs.  There are literally kilometres of paths atop the mountain, and most of the ones we did were along the side of a cliff.

And a walk on the glass-floor walkway… not too scary.

We stopped at a small booth that sold red cloths that you can write stuff on (we're guessing people typically write wishes), and tie it to a tree.  We decided to participate and add our mark.

You can also visit some nice temples at the top

The other attraction on this mountain is the Gate to Heaven. 999 stairs up to reach a giant natural hole in the mountain (or closer to 890 stairs from our count).  For those who are familiar with the GoPro camera, there is a famous video of a base jumper flying through this hole…it's worth googling… we'll add a link here later (ie. once we have access to YouTube again).

Of course, we can't end our post without some pictures of us goofing around! :)

Huangshan City (Tunxi)

After coming down from Yellow Mountain, we took a 1h bus and headed to Huangshan city where we stayed in the old district (Tunxi) for 2 nights. Not much happened (as we needed the time to recuperate from our 10,000+ steps), but we really enjoyed this part of town because it mainly consists of a charming main street with a bunch of cute shopping/artisan boutiques.

We searched for the tea house that Jen visited on a previous trip (which sells amazing teas - especially Jasmine), and did a tea-tasting.  We were convinced into buying $50 CAD of premium quality Jasmine tea….and that's for only 500g.. AND that was a discounted price that we were able to bargain for because Jen's parents also bought a large quantity of tea for their friends.

We later decided to get a massage to relax from our trek.  We found one massage place and.. they only spoke Mandarin.  We pointed at a random reasonably priced item on the Chinese poster and set off to get the massage (with no idea what we were getting).  All in all, it was a good and really funny experience.. not to mention, extremely painful once they started massaging our calves… out of the four of us, Jen was the only one who didn't yelp and squirm….tough girl.

One particularity of this town is the scooters. Many of them are equipped with a parachute…! ….err an umbrella ;)

Lastly, across the street from our hostel, there was a cool restaurant where they have samples of all of their dishes on display. To order, you just browse the items and write the associated number on the order form. Then you go to your table and they prepare the dishes fresh to order. We got to try some interesting stuff. Overall it was a fun experience with pretty good food, despite all of the grease that seems to be very characteristic of Chinese food.

Huangshan (aka Yellow Mountain)

Jen's mom and dad decided to join us on this part of the trip through Asia. For our first stop with them, we decided to go to Huangshan (aka Yellow Mountain), also now known as the inspiration for the world of Pandora in James Cameron's movie "Avatar". The biggest disappointment here was that there aren't actually any floating islands ;)

We visited the mountain for 2 consecutive days, sleeping at the top for one night in a dorm. It was a bit expensive to stay at the top (ie. $8 CAD for a coffee, $34 CAD/person in a 6-bed dorm room), but it was definitely worth it as it takes some time to make it off of the really touristy paths and onto the less visited trails.

If you're super lucky (ie. if the mountains aren't covered in clouds, rain or fog), you can enjoy an absolutely magnificent sunset and/or sunrise. Surprisingly, even at 5:30AM, there were as many crowds of chinese tourists as during mid-day. Here are some pics of the sunset that we were lucky enough to see.

And here is the sunrise…. overall, we were super lucky with the weather conditions!!

One particularity of Yellow Mountain, which is hard to appreciate from the pictures, are the paths. The 30+ kilometres of paths mainly consist of stairs.. over 10,000 stone steps zigzag up and down between the various mountain peaks. On rare occasion, we were actually lucky enough to encounter a flat area to allow our calves and knees to recuperate. We also discovered that if your legs finally give up, you can hire someone to carry you up/down the stairs…. ichhhhh… seems like HARD work!!  Workers there are also paid by weight to carry all of the merchandise/stock/supplies/gas/water/etc. up and down the stone step paths, from the gondola to the various stores and hotels.  They use basic bamboo sticks as lever-style-backpacks that carry about 200+ pounds (on average)…. it sure makes us realize how much we love our jobs!

There were about as many chinese tourists as there are stairs!!. It was actually impressive how many there were. On the path near the gondola there were so many tourists that we had full-on gridlock - a walking traffic stand-still.  Luckily, in the more remote areas, there were far less people so we could actually enjoy the scenery in silence.

We were also lucky encounter an entertaining family of monkeys that came up to visit us.

And what would be a hiking trip without some funny jumping pictures...

All in all this was one of the best landscapes we've seen on our trip, so far!

Tongli

About 2 hours (by bus) from Shanghai, there is a small typical chinese canal town called Tongli.  We decided to escape the big city for a day to explore it.

One of the amusing activities we did was to dressed up in traditional clothes and re-enact a childhood video game: Mortal Kombat

Shanghai (...the adventure continues)

Since we got the go-ahead from the doctor for Dom's hand, we decided to continue our adventure by hitting the next super-power….China. We decided to fly into Shanghai for a few days since it's the only major city in China that we hadn't visited yet. We also brought a friend, Guillaume (aka Guili (in french) / aka Geelee (in english)), who also quit his job and will be joining us for part of our adventure.

Also, Jen wants to thank everyone for all of the birthday wishes! And sorry in advance for any late responses.. it isn't possible to access Facebook from China so we won't be able to respond until we depart the country.

And, we'd also like to apologize if the photo galleries on our blog are a bit messed up for the next few posts.. it seems our website is also blocked, so we won't be able to fix / clean them up right away.

Anyways… back to Shanghai!  Big cities are big cities, but here are some of the spots we visited and enjoyed. One of the first sites we visited is the one often identified with Shanghai: "The Bund" and its view of the Pearl Tower.

We also visited the old town which is architecturally quite lovely, but it has very much been turned in a giant tourist shopping trap

We decided to go up Shanghai's World Financial Centre which, besides looking like a giant USB key, has the second highest observation deck in the world: 474 meters above ground level. The best part about it was that when we arrived at the building, we discovered that it is FREE to go up to the observation deck on your birthday... and wouldn't you know it.. the day we went happened to be Jen's Birthday…..Yay!!

Of course, we couldn't miss the Shanghai lights at night…and its dancing ladies ;)

If you know Jen personally and talk about China, you will hear her say: "I hate chinese food". However, after this trip, we now found a dish that she could not get enough of… The Food Republic is a food court where you buy a gift card and then shop around for what you would like to eat. There, we found some soup dumplings that Guili and Jen liked SOO much, that we actually went for 4 out of 5 dinners… They were THAT good!!

Finally, if you go to Shanghai, you have to take the world fastest (magnetic levitation) commercial train which takes you from the airport to a hub on the metro. On our approximately 8 minute trip, we managed to reach 431km/h… (according to the LED sign in the train..).