Travelling to Zhangjiajie Part 1

The dragon boat festival rolled round and with it a 3-day weekend. This seemed like a good opportunity to get out of the city and travel a little. After minimal research and zero planning we settled upon Zhangjiajie, a national park situated in Hunan province. The journey there would involve a four-hour train journey to Changsha followed by a four-hour coach journey to Zhangjiajie then a further hour from there to the national park itself (Wulingyuan).  Deciding to spend a night in Changsha to break up the journey slightly we left Wuhan in the afternoon on the first step of our journey. Wuhan has three train stations; Wuhan Train Station, Hankou Train Station and Wuchang Train Station. Wuhan Train Station is the newest and is the station along which the Mag-Lev trains run; now going from Guangzhou to Beijing. Changsha is actually on this line and takes two hours, though in a Scrooge-like determination to minimise costs we opted for the slightly less modern and slower train leaving from Wuchang Train Station.

Sticking two fingers up to both convenience and modernity the Chinese rail office has managed to stay impressively backward. Purchasing train tickets can be purchased no sooner than ten days in advance of travel and cannot be done online - around holidays this can lead to large queues at ticket offices and many people will be left without tickets. Getting up early and staking out your place in line is a must. Luckily for us this particular route was not terribly busy nor was it a popular time to travel. To be on the safe side though we bought our tickets a couple of days in advance and on the day, found our way to our train without issue.

Sat in our slightly cramped compartment and basking in our thriftiness we decided to reinvest our saved money on beer. At 4RMB a can, and with a vendor regularly making his way up and down the carriage it was the only sensible idea. Much to the amusement of our fellow passengers we steadily filled our little table with empty cans and before we knew it had arrived in Changsha. Not having booked accommodation, we were reduced to wandering around the vicinity of the train station until we stumbled across a hotel. Luckily there were a couple of hotels close by and after checking one or two out we settled on a hotel that was as cheap as it was seedy. I was sharing a room with Rich whilst Bobby and Sean were in the other room. The rooms were basic though perfectly fine, as well as being (worryingly) equipped with gas masks and breathing apparatus. Actually only Bobby and Sean’s room had gas masks which were pretty serious looking and decked out in space-age silver, not sure who left those there but we preferred not to spend too much time thinking about that.

As mentioned in another blog BBQs are open all night and are a great place for a social dinner – luckily these are not limited to Wuhan, and the four of us soon found ourselves tucking into some night snacks. Probably the highlight was a bird we found roasting on a spit, which was particularly tender and doused in a delicious spicy sauce. What it actually was we were eating was somewhat of a mystery (chicken, pigeon….squirrel?) though when living in China it’s probably not worth overthinking it. Dinner gave us a good opportunity to add to the beers we’d had on the train which, considering that it had mostly consisted of travelling and finding accommodation, completed a fairly satisfactory day.