Tom's visit 2015 part 3: FengHuang (moved from old blog)

 

The Return of the Brother: FengHuang

As was to be expected, we hit a few road blocks on the way to FengHuang from YangShuo. First of all we had a terrible train journey to ChangSha, some genius had given a kid an iPad and she proceeded to play that irritating song from Frozen for over 2 hours. At first it was a little funny, then other people on the train started joining in (at which point I plugged into my phone and watched a movie) then more people joined in (at this point Tom is growling into his book) then a ticket collector came along and told the kid to turn it down which the kid ignored. 

We got off the train after 4 hours of torture stressed out and very grumpy. I googled a hostel in ChangSha and we went and checked in, the thought of another 4 hours on a train nearly killed us. 

ChangSha is a big city with nothing going on. Even google says so. We found a ticket office and bought tickets for the next morning to JiShou from where we could catch the bus to FengHuang. 

After our first train journey, the second one went incredibly smoothly. We had somehow booked beds for a daytime journey so nearly had the carriage to ourselves. Luxury. We arrived into JiShou and found the bus to FengHuang without issues. 45 minutes later we were there. 
The hostel had warned us that they were difficult to find, this would later turn out to be a massive understatement. We managed to get to one of the entrances of the city and gave up and called them. My Chinese being OK but my FengHuang knowledge being non existent we recruited two very bored looking shop assistants to help us out. They talked to the hostel and sorted us out with a meeting point, from where the hostel staff came and picked us up. 
After checking in and showering, we went for a walk to see what was going on. FengHuang is an ancient city built along a river so many of the building hang over the water and the place is full of very impressive and beautiful bridges. 

During the day it is a beautiful place with a few too many bongo drum shops and beef jerky salesmen, but at night the whole city is transformed into some kind of bar and club Disney land like nightmare. All of the bars were blasting terrible club music in competition with their neighbour, who was blasting a slightly different song. Lights flashed everywhere and lazers shot in all directions. Every bar had staff outside trying to bully you into their bar but looking inside them nearly every bar was absolutely deserted. We got tired of the bar bullies fairly quickly and so went back to the room for an early night, we would try again in the morning. 

Overnight we had months worth of rain in only a few hours. Our brilliant plan of getting up and continuing with daytime exploration was looking less and less likely. About 8 o'clock the rain stopped so we blasted out to see as much as we could. We hadn't really appreciated how much rain there had been until we got to the river and many of the shorted bridges had been submerged. Also the dark green of the river from the day before was now a brilliant brown littered with debris from further upstream. It was a no go on the boat trip so instead we walked the river banks. In terms of the view from the bank vs the boat it likely doesn't change much but boats are always fun and different. 

We walked as far as the city extended in one direction and then turned back to walk the walls. On our way we found a partially completed bridge that had not been expecting the sudden deluge of water. We spent only a few hours in FengHuang wandering about as there really wasn't too much to see, I have heard of other water towns that are similar but haven't been discovered by the tourists yet. These i would certainly recommend investigating as just sheer number of people made FengHuang a stressful place to visit, even if only for a night. 

Our next stop was ZhangJiaJie, or the Avatar mountains. This was the main attraction of this trip and what we had been looking forward to for weeks.