The journey from Yichang to Zhangjiajie was slightly complicated. A taxi took us to Yichang’s massive railway station. In 2012 it was a pokey little place in the centre of town but by 2014 the new station had been built on the edge of the town. By 2024 it was surrounded by suburbs of high-rise blocks and felt like it was in the centre of the town. As a major transport hub and centre of high-tech manufacturing, Yichang is growing as a phenomenal pace.
It was a half-hour journey to Jinzhou, another million-strong city I had never heard of. A taxi took us for miles across the city to the bus station where an attractive lady approached us shouting “Zhangjiajie”. Thinking she was a fixer or a beggar (not that we have seen any beggars this year) I ignored her but she followed us into the station and, as I tried to tell a lady in the ticket office what we wanted to do, she kept shouting “Zhangjiajie” and pointing to the buses. So we followed her and tried to explain that we didn’t have tickets. A crowd of 10 people gathered and a man who spoke English said “You need tickets. Give her 260 RMB and she’ll get them”. The price was right (Alex Chu had told us the price has 260) so I gave her the money with a sense of foreboding that we would never see her again. I went for a pee, and on the way she came running up with two tickets.
Our theory is that Alex Chu must have phoned the bus station to ask them to look out for us. She appeared to have some sort of official job ensuring that passengers got on the right bus. Anyway, we were very grateful to her. The bus ride was recently pleasant but only lasted one of the four hours that it should take us to get to Zhangjiajie before it stopped, and other passengers started shouting “Zhangjiajie” at us and pointing to another bus across the road. So we got onto it and it took us to Zhangjiajie. The landscape was a mixture of dense forest and small towns interspersed with paddy fields. Only as we approached our destination did it change to distant views of the Tianmenshan range of mountains and a beautiful gorge with a river running through it. The town was substantially bigger than I remember in 2012 with mile after mile of high rise blocks. After emerging from the bus station we walked straight into the excellent Atour hotel and, feeling hungry, learned that “there is a free supper from 9 to 11. Good, we thought, and waited until 9, only to discover that “supper” was onion rings, fried balls of mashed potato and rice soup. We went to bed hungry.
The Yangtse
The train to Jinzhou
