Monday, July 13

Today we woke up early for a 5-hour bus trip to Zhangjiajie. It is famous for it's national park and is compared to America's Yellowstone National Park. I'd seen pictures of the park before the trip and the scenery and nature looked amazing, so I was excited to go. Breakfast was early, but I elected to skip it and get a few more minutes of sleep instead. On the trip pretty much everybody fell asleep immediately. I stayed awake mostly listening to music, reading (7th book of the summer so far), and looking at the sights outside the bus window. I finally got a look of China that wasn't just all city. We passed lots of rural areas with farms that grew mostly rice. It felt like I'd gone back in time. I would see the farmers, with rice hats, manually tending to their fields, oxen pulling carts, and women hand washing clothes in the local stream. I was very curious if these farmers lived a peaceful agrarian lifestyle or struggled just to get by. Before lunch our tour guide asked for male volunteers to learn how to sing some songs. I didn't step up because it would've been too hard to learn the songs. Apparently in Zhangjiajie restaurants, in order to get food, the women workers sing to the group and men from our group are supposed to sing back. I thought it was a pretty cool custom. After another delicious lunch we drove for a few more hours until we got to our hotel. It was much nicer than the one in Changsha but, rooming with my cousin Paul, it was a little awkward because the room seemed to have a romantic vibe to it. All the lights had kind of a red glow to them, and there was a huge bathtub. The bathroom didn't have a door and if that wasn't bad enough, we learned that there was not really a wall, but just a glass panel. So you could see into the bathroom from the rest of the room.

After unpacking in the hotel room, we went to the Yellow Dragon Cave. Their were huge caverns filled with mostly stalagmites (coming from the ground up). I noticed there weren't many stalactites (coming from the ceiling down) and hypothesized that most of them were cleared away so they didn't break off and hit people below, I have no way of verifying this though. In a smaller cavern only about 7 feet high a bat came out of nowhere and was flying near everybody which was unexpected and scared a lot of people. The caverns were illuminated by lights full of many different bright colors, giving the cave a sort of magical feeling to it. There was an underground river in the cave and I thought it was awesome that we got to take a boat down part of the river. The water was very cold and it was very dark and quiet on the boat.

After the cave we went to a forest area that had a lake in it. We had to walk uphill for about 15 minutes and reached the entrance. There were two waterfalls coming from a mountain which was looked amazing, but not as good once you learn that it's partly man-made. We hiked through the forest for another 15 minutes and reached the lake. From there we drove around the lake, but it was nothing special in my opinion. I was just looking forward to going to the national park the next day.