In my blog China trip, November 2024, I gave some background information about our trip with a selection of the many pictures we took during that 8D7N trip. In this post I will be more detailed.

On 6 November we took a Grab to KLIA, where we checked it with Batik Air, because they have a direct flight to Zhang Jia Jie. Immigration now has a special gate for MM2H, no queue. There was time enough to have breakfast.

The flight took about 5 hours. When we booked, we had ordered lunch, which was quite good

Aric had booked a hotel in Wi Ling Yuan town, near to the main entrance of the Zhang Jia Jie National Forest Park, our destination for the next day. A taxi was waiting for us, arranged by the hotel. China is quite advanced nowadays, with an almost cashless economy.

The hotel reception was very friendly and gave us suggestions about what to do the next day. We had a nice big room, the table on the left is a Mahjong table 😉 . The room had aircon that could be switched to cooling or heating. Very useful, we needed the heating 😉 .

From the roof terrace we had an impressive view of the mountains. The Zhang Jia Jie National Forest Park is famous for its thousands of quartzite sandstone pillars, many of them hundreds of meters high. A real stone forest.

The local cuisine is mainly based on pork. The hotel suggested a suitable restaurant, where we had our dinner. Braised pork,  stir-fried young lotus roots and veggie. Not bad. Walking back to our hotel we did some shopping for our hike the next day.

Breakfast was included and served on the roof terrace. It was very cold, less than 10 degrees, but we were prepared, had brought fleece and jackets.

The park entrance was not very far from the hotel, but we took a taxi anyway, because we expected a lot more walking in the park. Although off-season there were still many visitors.

A ticket gives you four days access, because there is a lot to see. But we had only one day, so we could only visit a few highlights. Left the map given to us by the hotel with some of their markings, right a map near the park entrance.

The transport in the park is very well organised. From the entrance a bus brought us to the lower cable car station. Of course we started already taking picture from the cable car, although there were reflections. The first pillars!

A view of the cable car, taken from the upper station. Very impressive scenery.

There were many groups with their tour guide, armed with a flag and a noisy microphone, so it was not always easy to take pictures.

Here is a part of the stone forest

Aric was hoping that there might be autumn colors and we found some, around a pagoda..

More stone forest. We were very lucky with the weather. Aric chatted with a Taiwan guy who had visited the park a few years ago, and had not seen much because everything was in the mist.

We had to climb up and down a lot. Stunning views everywhere.

The park is very well organised, there are toilets and places where you can have food and drinks. Buses shuttle between places of interest. Sometimes we had to queue for a few minutes, but in many places there was no waiting time. That must be very different during peak season.

More pillars, more views

The picture below was taken from the Internet, you need a drone to take it. It is named the First Bridge under Heaven, 2 meter wide, 5 meter thick and about 400(!) . meter above ground level. It’s a natural rock bridge and we crossed it.

The bridge leads to a shrine, covered in red wishing ribbons. We bought two for our own roof garden 😉

Using the shuttle bus we visited another part of the park.

The rock pillar below apparently inspired the creator of the Avatar movie for the floating mountains in that iconic movie. The pillar has now been named the Avatar Hallelujah mountain.

More views, we kept taking pictures while it became slowly darker (sunset around 5:30 pm!)

At the end of our long hike we descended by elevator! The Bailong elevator brings you down 326 meter in 1 minute and 32 seconds. Opened in 2015 it was the tallest outdoor elevator in the world. A bus brought us back to the entrance, where the pagoda was now brighly lit.

We had walked 11 km, 16000 steps and climbed 44 flights. Time for a well-deserved dinner.

Pork again, tofu and long beans. I had a funny fruit as dessert. It is called Kiwano, I thought it was typical Chinese, but found out later that it is native to South Africa.

We could have walked home, but decided to take a taxi 😉 . What a day!