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When we arrived late at night in the city of Zhangjiejia, the smell of the air will be impossible to really describe, but it was like a thick bonfire mixed with tar. Coal smoke.
The air quality would taint our visit to the park quite a bit.
Word of the day
Shān 山 - Mountain
Tianmenshan
Tianmenshan is a unique mountain just south of the city of Zhangjiejia, in the central China province of Hunan.
Dispite the air, we were there and ready to explore. Our first stop was chosen by Kai, and it was a place unlike any I have ever been before. To this day, Tianmenshan is the most intense place I have ever seen.
There is two cable cars up. one that goes to the very top, and one that goes to the heaven gate, a massive hole in the mountain pictured above.
Since we bought our tickets late, we were apparently going in the opposite direction of most people, starting at the lower point. This would be a bit of a blessing, because as I came to find out, everywhere in China is absolutely full of people.
Now, I’ve always seen those chinese walkways that look like they are just bolted to the side of a cliff, but didn’t realize just how crazy they are in person. It really is just thousands of feet straight down, and a crumbly concrete path with a snall rusty railing, jutting right out the side.
And i’m not kidding, some of the cliffs were 3,000 feet plus vertical drops.
At the base of the ‘windgate’, the hole in the mountain, there is a huge set of stairs called the “999 steps”. After climbing up the stairs there is, without doubt, the longest set of escalators I have ever seen that goes up right through the center of the mountain. It felt endless to the point where I couldn’t remember a time before I was on the escalator, and could imagine there would be a time when I got off.
I’m not kidding when I say Chinese people absolutely love escalators. Anywhere an escalator can be, it’ll be there.
The very top of the mountain is like a table top. It is flat with sheer cliffs on all sides, and absolutely huge.
Top of Tianmenshan
I thought the mountain would be a nice nature spot. It is a high adrenaline theme park.
The top of the mountain has a huge amount of crazy attractions to se, most of them involving being on the edge of stupidly tall cliffs, on crumbly infrastructure that looks past it’s prime.
There are a seemingly endless amount of cliffside walks, complete with glass floors, tall viewing platforms, bridges, and cable rides over massive caverns.
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At the very back of the mountain, seemingly deserted by everyone there for thrills, was an incredible buddist temple.
It was exactly what I wanted to see in China, and had a very very old history. It was very serene to be in such a calm place on top of such an extreme mountain.
They even had one of the real buddha’s “pearls”. These are little stones that were found in the buddha’s ashes when he was cremated. It is supposed to show that he was godlike, or something. Kai said she thinks they are kidney stones.
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It was my favorite thing to see in China up to that point, and remains among the top.
Temple Cat
It was getting dark, so we took a chairlist back to the summit, and then got on the cable car down. We had no idea just how long it was. It went all the way down from the top, through valleys, over ridges and villages. We eventually saw the huge city and it just kept going and going right to the center.
We eventually found out that this was actually the longest cable car in the world, over 7 miles long!
Journal Entry
We went up Tianmen mountain.
I was expecting a nature walk but it is more like a theme park. It is probably the craziest place I have ever seen.
Tianmen mountain has the big famous hole in it, called Tianmen cave. It is flat on top, with massive cliffs on all sides.
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To get up we needed to take a bus to a cable car. First we went to the big hole with a massive set of stairs leading up to it. It had those Chinese paths I’ve seen pictures of where it is just sticking out of a cliff.
We walked up the big stairs. To get to the top part of the mountain, we needed to take the most ridiculous escalator ever, it was a series of 7 massive escalators that went straight through the center of the mountain.
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The top forms a big loop surrounded by huge cliffs. We first walked on a very scary bridge thing, made of crumbling concrete on the side of a cliff. I decided that’s probably enough of those for me. Next we went to a small temple, and a large peak over looking the windgate, of course with a sketchy concrete overlook.
We walked around to the back with more sheer cliffs and crazy paths hanging over the edge (one that I avoided entirely) until we got to the temple at the back.
The Buddhist temple here was the nicest thing I have seen in China so far. The pictures should speak for it.
It was getting dark now, so we decided to take a chairlift to the top, and skip the second half of the loop. I’m very glad we did as from the chairlift we could se the only path back was the scariest of them all, consisting of a huge suspension bridge and long cliffhanging paths.
We then took the longest cable car I’ve ever seen back to the city. (I guess it was the longest anyone has ever seen)
After such a long day, we still needed to take a taxi for an hour to Wulingyuan, so we could explore the Zhangjiejia National Park the following day