After 5 days of recovering in my apartment, I feel I have the energy to tell the storey of our travels in ZhangJiaJie.
We got up unnaturally early on the Saturday morning to catch our 8.30 train; this was to be my first journey on Chinese trains. We arrived early but when it was time to board we found ourselves trapped in a raging crowd of angry Chinese people trying to get on. We, cleverly, had pre-booked out tickets. We held the class “hard sleeper”, which entitled us to a bunk bed each in a clean standard carriage. The journey took 6 hours and carried us through an interesting array of countryside and 18th Century style dirty factories.
Our taxi driver from the station to our hotel was very chatty and didn’t hold back telling us that our hotel was far to expensive and he could show us some cheaper ones. We managed to politely decline thanks to Jake’s hard work with his Chinese text book. Our hotel was nice, cheap by British standards, and disappointing for Jake as there were no cable channels to watch pointless documentaries about computer games. However, it did the job. We got straight to it and went searching for things to do. A particularly touristy spot was recommended to us, so Jake, Duncan and I set off to explore. After begrudgingly spending 80yuen entrance fee, we were expecting to see some amazing stuff. As it happens, there was a lot of interesting things to be seen; ancient buildings, old artifacts, a medieval working village which comprised of roasting a whole dead lamb and a cock fighting pit amongst other things. We lost out on a lot of the good stuff as we didn’t have a tour guide, and it was too cold to stay interested for long, so we found a restaurant, after walking into the first one with carcasses of animals decorating the walls, not so appetizing for our vegetarian friend.