Zhangjiajie (Avatar Mountains)
The Hunan region is home to a famous national park, mostly known for the jaw-dropping mountain scenery that inspired the landscape of the Avatar movies. The city of Zhangjiajie (张家界市) lies in the north of the province, with excellent bullet train and flight connections. We arrived from Xi’an after a short flight in the evening hours and took a reasonably priced DiDi directly to the town of Wulingyuan, which also serves one of the five entrances to the national park.
Where to stay: Wulingyuan
The city is a popular starting point for exploring the park. There is no shortage of hotels here. You can also find many restaurants, a night market and shops around town. The hotel staff might even be able to get you the tickets to the national park at a discount, however, it is advisable to decide which parts and routes you would like to explore upfront. They will try to sell you the “whole package”, which can quickly become expensive. We booked the simply named Mountain View Guesthouse ($) not too far from the entrance of the national park.
Some other great hotel options we also considered are:
- Wally House Hostel ($)
- Pullman Zhangjiajie ($$)
- Hampton by Hilton Zhangjiajie National Forest Park ($$)
The Avatar Mountains and the surrounding forests cover a vast area, but the routes for tourists are well maintained, with multiple bus lines, elevators and cable cars shuttling tourists between the scenic viewpoints.
Also, it’s not necessary to come prepared with 3 days’ worth of food rations: the chances of getting lost are slim, and there is a huge number of vendors and street food stalls scattered across the park. To our surprise, there is even a McDonald’s at the top of the mountain…
We bought our tickets via Trip.com (link) and could enter by registering and scanning our passports at the entrance. Worth noting is that tickets sell out fast, so make sure to buy them a couple of weeks in advance!
Our advice is to buy entry tickets for early morning entry, as the park gets swarmed (mostly) by Chinese tourists throughout the day.
The map on China Discovery is a tremendous help for planning your visit: link. Note that you won’t have to walk all the trails marked on the map. These are bus routes.
Our one-day route
We followed our own one-day DIY track, as we only had a short time to visit. You can follow along on the map linked above!
- Enter via Wulingyuan Gate
- Take the bus to the Bailong Elevator
- Take the elevator to the top and take a short walk through the forest
- Take the bus to The First Bridge and take a long walk along the edge of the mountain. This is where you really get to see why it is called the Avatar Mountains!
- Take the bus, with one change, to the Tianzi Mountain Cableway
optional: Get lost and take the bus back and forth for half an hour, just like we did - Have some lunch 😉
- Take the cable car down the mountain – the weather turned pretty awful by the time we arrived at the upper cable car station, and the visibility became practically zero.
- We were planning to visit the Ten Mile Gallery, where you can hop on a tram that takes you along the foot of the hills. We skipped this, as we wouldn’t have been able to see anything due to the weather. Time-wise, it would have worked well as part of our one-day itinerary.
This is far from an ideal itinerary to experience everything the park has to offer, but as we were short on time, we tried to press the highlights into one single day. Otherwise, we could definitely have spent 2-3 days exploring the other trails and viewpoints as well.
As you might have guessed, the weather plays a crucial role here: the day after our visit, a huge storm battered the park, and they had to close down the entire area to visitors, unfortunately. That being said, hiking gear is not an absolute necessity, as the roads are well paved and the shuttle buses conveniently operate at 5-minute intervals. We recommend packing some light layered clothes and rainproof gear, though, just in case. Or at least an umbrella, just like we did…
Selfie Time!
Since this region is less explored by foreign tourists as of now, locals were very keen to take pictures with and of us. One time we asked an elderly lady to take a photo of us at a lookout point with the view – well, the other Chinese visitors in the queue also grabbed their own phones and quickly took a pic of us too. 😀 Adam got asked for selfies almost every day and eventually started asking for them back…
Tianmen Mountain
We stayed one night in the city of Zhangjiajie, so that we could have conveniently visited the Tianmen Mountain (check out our choice of hotel here, the recently built Xiangxi Love Hotel with great city views). Unfortunately, it was very foggy and rainy on the day we planned to visit and we were ultimately advised by our hotel receptionist not to go. To show us why, she pulled out the local version of TikTok (Douyin – 抖音) and showed us what it currently looked like up there – basically a white drape of fog covering everything beyond 3 metres. No glass bridge for us, sadly.
Interestingly enough, this turned out to be a very good method of checking current conditions in general – it seems like there is always someone streaming or uploading reels in China anytime, anywhere.
Anyway, Tianmen Mountain is also known as Heaven’s Door and can be reached via the world’s longest cable car ride from the railway station of Zhangjiajie.
There are two possible directions for visiting here, where the main deciding factor is whether you want to climb the 999 stairs leading up to Tianmen Cave, pay for the elevator, or do the tour in reverse direction.
AsiaOdysseyTravel has an excellent map of the area here.
72 Strange Buildings
Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to go to this place, but saw it from the car all lit up and it looked fabulous!
This complex doesn’t actually consist of 72 buildings, the number rather represents the concept of “many” in Chinese. Still, the attached stilted buildings make up the Guinness World’s highest stilted building! The structure is surreal even from a distance with a bridge-like arch and a gaping hole beneath it. You have to pay an entrance fee, and you can enjoy a light show, many shops, restaurants and experience the Tujia culture. Make sure to check out the schedule of the performances in the excellent China Travel Guide article.
What to eat
Hunan cuisine, one of the 8 traditional Chinese cuisines, is probably less known internationally, especially when compared to its Sichuan or Cantonese siblings. It is characterised by the generous use of chilli, fresh produce and smoked/cured ingredients. Some notable (and for us, quite exotic) dishes are Changsha stinky tofu, steamed fish head, crayfish and Chairman Mao’s red braised pork belly, which used to be Mao Zedong’s favourite dish, apparently. It turned out to be our favourite in the region too!
- Laoma Xianfancai in Zhangjiajie: this restaurant was recommended by our kind hotel staff when we asked for somewhere to try local dishes. It did not disappoint! Location: Amap
- Wulingyuan restaurants: there is an abundance of restaurants, many of them serving local Hunan cuisine. We don’t think you can go awfully wrong with any of them, really. We didn’t manage to find the one we ate at on Amap, unfortunately.
- Wulingyuan night market: lined along the northernmost road of the town, you will find many affordable street food stalls open until late night.
Zhangjiajie is also part of our recommended two-week itinerary in China for first-timers, make sure to take a look to find out what other gems we recommend visiting!
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