Beautiful Tianmen Mountains

September 15, 2017:  The day started early with a 6 a.m. morning call and departure at 7:30 a.m.  After we got ready, we went to the same restaurant we went to last night for dinner for the continental breakfast.

Breakfast selection was limited but there was still a noodle bar station.  Chinese people really like their morning noodle bowls here! XD

I filled up on rice and congee mostly.

Noodle bar station in the morning

My breakfast — I wanted white rice but they only had fried rice and plain congee; good enough

Morning view

Sunrise!

After we got on the bus, we had a 4-hour bus ride ahead of us before we got to the first destination.  We had a rest stop in between too.

Convenience store — look at all those different types of bottle water!

Found a cool drum to ring at the shop too

Along the way up the mountain, we saw a beautiful sight of fog surrounding low-lying mountain peaks.  It was so picturesque!

Look!

Wow!

This was so pretty!

The Tianmen Mountain cable car station

By 11:30 a.m., we had arrived at the restaurant next to the cable car station where we would be taking the cable car up to Tianmen Mountain (天門山).  But first, lunch!  I didn’t get a good photo of the dishes before we started eating them because I was lining up for the washroom; you know how when the bus stops and everyone rushes to the washroom and the ladies’ room is always a long queue.

But first, lunch!

Our lunch that day

The food overall was okay here, but I especially loved the stewed fatty pork and the soup in the middle of the table.  Starting from this day onwards, we had the stewed fatty pork dish more and it was so delicious there in Changsha! 😀

Nom nom?

After lunch, we went straight to the cable car station that was next door.  We queued up and boarded the cable cars, eight people in one car.  It was a very long cable car ride and it made sense because we were going up the really tall and really big Tianmen Mountain National Park!

The views going up were amazing to say the least.  Looking down, you could see all of the winding roads.  This was the windiest road I’ve ever seen on a mountain.

This was the poster before we entered the facility to board the cable car up the mountain

Going in and lining up

Cable cars!

Going up and over the city

Such a cool shot

Up and up we went

We were so high up!

We could see the wide archway on Tianmen Mountain!

This was AMAZING to see

We spotted a ladder going up the mountain too XD

Once up there, we kept walking and the tour guide informed us about the path that we would be taking.  We would be going over and through Tianmen Mountain, through the glass cliff path, paths bordering the mountain and through it, and then taking escalators down before being able to walk down the main entrance of the mountain back to the ground.

The initial walking path

Look at how small those cable cars look

Map of Tianmen Mountain

He first led us to the glass cliff path that we had seen via shared videos on social media before.  We put on cloth slippers over our shoes so that we wouldn’t scratch the glass path.

Here we go!

Cloth slippers to protect the glass

View looking down

Of course you gotta sit XD

😀

It really wasn’t scary at all — not that I’m afraid of heights anyway 😛 .  We tried to take as many photos as we could but the glass path was actually way shorter than expected.  Before we knew it, we were already finished.

I liked this shot — it really shows you the scale of height here

Don’t look down :p

We continued following the path.  Considering it was China and a hot tourist destination, there were a lot of people there.  It took some time to get through the path.  The views were gorgeous though; mountains everywhere you turned.

More views of the down below

Walking with the crowd towards the archway

This view!

Hello!

We then took the first set of escalators which led us to the wide archway.

Entrance to the escalators to go down the mountain

One of the many escalators we took to go down

After this, we exited one segment and it brought us towards the archway

This was under the archway where a past record for gliding in a wingsuit was done

We also passed through the 30 m (100 feet) wide archway before getting to the entrance of the Mountain.  Instead of walking down the steps as the tour guide first said we would be, he then changed his mind to say that it wasn’t safe and it was a better idea for us to get to the bottom of the mountain by taking the last set of escalators.  This wasn’t ideal so we quickly took a photo on the stairs of the entrance-way before we continued on to the escalators.

Stairs at the entrance of Tianmen Mountain

Entrance view of the mountain

After getting to the front of the mountain and taking photos there (it was famous there to see the archway after all), we boarded two buses in order to get to the bottom of the mountain.  It was a very shaky bus ride since we were going through all the winding roads that we previously saw.

Fleet of buses to transport tourists to and from the bottom of the mountain

On the first bus going down!

So shaky!!

Look at how close and curved the roads were

The first bus stopped here to let us off

This was the second bus we took to get back to the parking lot where our tour bus was

By 4:30 p.m. that day, we were at dinner already.  (We think that because we skipped the walking-down-the-stairs part at the mountain, we were early because we noticed that the other tour groups didn’t arrive at the restaurant until later.)

Dinner that night was a mushroom soup hot pot with accompanying dishes.  You could put noodles into the mushroom hot pot too.  The soup was good.

Restaurant where dinner was

Mushroom soup hot pot dinner

The accompanying dishes that night

Adding noodles to the soup to have mushroom soup noodles

What the restaurant looked like from the front

Our hotel for the night

We checked into the Mellow Crystal Hotel at 5:30 p.m. and had an opportunity to rest up and groom before we headed for our last part of the itinerary for the day.  This part was an option part of the tour which was a live show performed on the site of Tianmen Mountain.  We didn’t go up all the way to the top of the mountain but went to the ground level where they had a stage set up against the mountain side.  It was really cool!

The tour bus picked us up again at 7:30 p.m. and we went to the show.

Returning back to Tianmen Mountain at night for the show

Getting there, I had thought it was going to be an indoor show but it made sense after when I found out that the stage was actually next to the mountain.  I was really looking forward to it and had high hopes for it but was ultimately disappointed because it didn’t turn out to be that great in quality.  The production stage was huge though.  There were probably 100 people in the cast who all performed and danced to the pre-recorded music and songs.  It was impressive nevertheless.

Entering into the mountain stage

Poster for the show

“The Love Story of A Woodman and A Fairy Fox” stage

Look at all those people just for the opening act!

The show was about an hour and a half.  If it had more of a plot and better acting components, it would have been more entertaining.  I appreciated that they had subtitles on a large scene to the side of the stage.  It was in English, Japanese, and Korean too.

It was a great day with lots of walking.  Tomorrow, we visit the infamous Avatar mountains!! 😀

Adventurous Day 2 of Changsha!

To view the blog posts for the other days of our trip, click here:  Day 1, Day 2, Day 4, Day 5, and Day 6.