Beautiful Hunan West - 湘西
Posted On Sunday, June 8, 2008 at at 2:35 AM by AlvinThe western edge of the Hunan Province (湖南) is known as (湘西) and is well known for the beautiful limestone-quartz formation of Zhang Jia Jie (張家界) and the picturesque village-by-the-river of Feng Huang (鳳凰古城).
Zhang Jia Jie (張家界)
ZJJ is a huge national park which really warrants at least a week's stay to explore the entire park. With three days, we saw the main sites with the help of the internal "green" shuttle buses and a couple of medium-effort (3 hours) stair cases. The park was not as packed as we had thought for this time of the year, as we were told by local villagers that the Sichuan earthquake a few weeks back had deterred many of the would-be tourists. The mountain formations were just stunning and they looked like three-dimensional water-color Chinese paintings !
Feng Huang (鳳凰古城)
Feng Huang (鳳凰古城)After three lovely days exploring ZJJ, we moved on to the ancient village of Feng Huang (鳳凰古城). This village-by-the-river oozed character aplenty ! We explored the narrow winding streets behind the river and they reminded us of our times in Lijiang (麗江). One word though, this was a very lively and young town as amongst the quiet and characteristic village houses were some major drinking holes with heavy R&B music- the most densely packed we had come across for this trip.
We planned to take a bus to get back to HKG via Hengyang (衡陽) and Shenzhen . So we stopped for 2 nights at Hengyang and visited a few interesting sites which included The Hengyang City Park (衡陽生態公園) where we saw Big Head ! No idea who this guy was !
We planned to take a bus to get back to HKG via Hengyang (衡陽) and Shenzhen . So we stopped for 2 nights at Hengyang and visited a few interesting sites which included The Hengyang City Park (衡陽生態公園) where we saw Big Head ! No idea who this guy was !
