Visiting Tianmen Mountain, Zhangjiajie, China

We travelled from Shanghai to Zhangjiajie, in the Hunan Province of China – we were here to explore Tianmen Mountain and the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, which served as the inspiration for the movie Avatar. We had almost four full days to explore.

Tianmen Mountain was first. Our day began with the Tianmen Mountain Cable Car, the longest continuous cable car in the world. Spanning seven kilometres and taking 30 minutes to travel from the city of Zhangjiajie to the top of Tianmen Mountain. At first the cable car passes over the city, then across farmland, before rising steeply up Tianmen Mountain, giving you a good view of Tianmen Cave, ‘Heaven’s Gateway’, a huge opening in the mountainside. We could see Tianmen Cave but at this point the cloud came in and the last part of our journey was in complete cloud..!

Once at the top we walked along the cliff hanging walkway, a concrete walkway with a railing, 1400 metres off the ground. There is nothing under the walkway apart from air! Unfortunately (or fortunately) for us we could not see a great deal from the walkway as the cloud cover was still thick. A section of the hanging walkway is made completely from glass. We walked the 60 metre Glass Skyway complete with material overshoes to keep the glass clean, and again the scare factor wasn’t really there as we could not see down to the ground due to the clouds. It was also packed with people.

The summer months of July and August are holiday months for the Chinese and everywhere we visited in this area was packed with Chinese tourists. There were long queues at the cable cars, lifts, and even some of the walkways.

Finally the clouds departed and we could see the stunning scenery. We walked around at the top of Tianmen Mountain and saw the launch site of the ‘winged man’ flights. From here we could see right down to the valley and parts of the Heaven-Linking Avenue, a road down from the mountain with 99 hairpin bends. You could see the sheer scale of the mountain’s cliff faces rising from the dense forest.

We were ready to begin our descent. We took 7 escalators (opened in 2014) down to Tianmen Cave, ‘Heaven’s Gateway’, a huge opening in the mountainside, 128 metres high and 60 metres wide. You could walk right through the opening. Both the ‘winged man’ and small fighter jets have flown through the opening and survived..! A short walk further and you were at the top of ‘The Stairway to Heaven’, 999 steps leading up and down to the cave. They have also built 5 escalators down from here to bring/take guests up and down this part of the mountain. The last part of our journey down the mountain was a bus ride down the Heaven-linking Avenue, and it certainly was bendy!