Avatar Mountains

Hello 😊
After a really long train journey, over 20 hours and then over 1 hour on the local bus to the 'village' where our hostel was located, we arrived at our destination Wulingyuan near Zhangjiajie after almost 1.5 days. Since the sun sets early here, we couldn't do much anymore, so we went to bed early and prepared for the hike through the national park the next day.
We started at 7 am with a Chinese breakfast and started walking very motivated, so that we missed our stairs that were supposed to lead to our planned destination and ended up walking to the other end of the park. But there we met two really nice New Yorkers with whom we started searching for the stairs again. Since the two of them speak Chinese/Mandarin, it made the tour easier and we found the somewhat strenuous, steep stairs and ended up at the breathtaking Avatar Mountains. The mountain range is called that because the landscape was inspired by this landscape from the Avatar movie. It was a really great view and the mountain and rock formations were really impressive. Sometimes I really felt like I was in the movie, only the blue avatars were missing, but there were cool monkeys🐒. We were also really lucky because there were very few other tourists with us as we walked to the observation platforms on the footpath. However, it was still crowded in some places.

In the second part of the day, we visited the Tianzi Mountains which are also located in the national park. The bus ride there was very winding, but it was also rewarded with an amazing view. The light fog that had settled over the back mountain ranges made everything a bit mystical. From the mountains, we then walked down again on stairs. We then took a bus back to our hostel just as the rain started, grabbed our luggage and drove back to Zhangjiajie. Thanks to the 40,000 steps we took, we arrived there very tired but satisfied 😊
From there, we continued this morning with a 5-hour bus ride to Changsha and now we are sitting in a train for another 3.5 hours to get to Guilin. From there, it will probably take another 2 hours to get to our hostel in the middle of the karst mountains. Here in China, the distances between the great places often take a long time and are sometimes very slow, but so far every minute on the train and bus has been worth it. The views and experiences are just beautifully amazing 😊
Your Lena