China

My original plan (for as much as I had any type of real planning for this trip at all) for after leaving Beijing was to head down the eastern coast of China to Shanghai or fly directly to Hong Kong. But after to talking with fellow travelers and learning more about what China had to offer, I decided to hop my way directly south through central China. Each city looked on the map to be smaller and smaller, none with notable names, so I thought I would be getting a little off the beaten path into some rural areas. However, with 1.7 billion people in China, even what seems like a small city on the map has now grown into a highly populated metropolis with constant construction of high-rise housing.
My first stop was the city of Xi’An. Here I climbed Mt Huashan and saw the Terra Cotta Warrior (I talk about both in other blog entries). Also in Xi’An I met several really cool people that I made plans to meet up with in other parts of China and southeast Asia.
From Xi’An I hopped a 12-hour train further south to Chongqing. The city was again very big, although I found lodging in a small corner of the city called Ciqikou, that remained a quaint, albeit crowded, fishing village along the river. There I relaxed for a day and waited for a new friend, Andrew from England, to join up with me. We only stayed in Chongqing for another day until we embarked on our piece-meal adventure down the Yangtze River to explore the Three Gorges area. Yangtze is the 3rd longest river in the world. There are many organized tours to go down the river on mini-cruiseships and stop at several temples and other tourist sites along the way. But we wanted to have more freedom and stop at only a few spots, but at our own pace. So we took a bus from Chongqing to Wanzhou, then boarded a locals boat down river to Wushan; where we stayed the night. The next day we took a smaller boat to check out the Smaller Three Gorges (on the Daning River). All the gorges were quite scenic, although not as amazing as I was hoping. We were going to do some hiking in this area as well, but found that the likelihood of manageable paths was extremely unlikely.
From Wushan we took a faster hydrofoil to Yichang. Yichang is where they just finished the largest power-producing dam, which has huge benefit, but has also drastically changed the landscape of the river gorges forever. The dam was cool to see for a minute because of its significance, but was rather boring visually.
There was not much to see in Yichang beside just another city, so we decided to head straight out. Since we didn’t get to hike around Wushan, we decided our next stop would be Zhangjiajie, which is home to a magnificent National Forest, of the same name. The Zhangjiajie NF has magnificent limestone karsts towering out of the earth all over the place. They are such an unimaginable sight that it was used as the backdrop for much of the Avatar film. They digitally removed the bottom half of the karsts to create the floating jungle islands. For natural beauty, it is up there with the Cliffs of Moher for my favorite. Unfortunately, as with most things in China, they have stripped some of the natural wonder of the area by making it far too touristy by littering the area with concrete pathways, buildings and vendor stands. I have found the Chinese do not understand the concept of hiking in nature. Andrew and I were constantly fighting our way around thousands of Chinese tourists in their everyday work clothes and dress shoes strolling along with no regard for any other people they may be impeding. But other than that, and the fact that we nearly missed our bus out of town because of the terrible maps of the park that were provided, Zhangjiajie NF a wonderful day trip.
Luckily we did not miss our bus and were on our way to Yangshou that evening. It was a nice escape after a few weeks of constant Chinese culture. The area is a popular tourist stop, and therefore is very westernized. It was possible to find actual breakfast food, burgers and pizza; not to mention the constant beer-pong games being played at Jungle Jane’s Rooftop Bar. But my real reason for the visit was to get some much needed rock climbing in. And there is definitely some nice climbing there. Not to mention meeting some really cool climbers.
After a few days of R&R in Yangshou it was time to say goodbye to China and see why Hong Kong is so adamant to be separate from China.