Dec-2015
Tianmen Mountain National Park
Tianmen Mountain National Park
Start in the morning with a cab from Zhangjiajie Mini Inn to Tianmen Lower Station for 6 cny, the location is close and walkable but since it’s raining so we prefer by cab.
Arrived there we bought two ticket 261 cny per person, it’s including two way/return cable car and car ride from Tianmen Cave back to the city (lower station).
The cable car ride is 45 minute which known for the longest cable car in the world. The more cable car ascending the weather condition changes from raining into snow fall and cloudy with short sight.
Tianmen Mountain National Park divided into three routes, left, right and middle route. Since the glass plank is closed due to heavy snow fall then we choose middle route to Yunmen Fairy Peak and continue with lift chair up to Tianmen Temple. The chair lift cost 25 cny per person. From up there you can take west/east route for 2 hours walk back to upper station, in this case we didn’t take both of that route but taking chair lift again back down.
Back down to Yunmeng Fairy Peak we walk to the giant escalator thru inside the mountain to Tianmen Cave. The tunnel spanning 672 meters consists of 12 sections, with a total operation length of 897 meters and hoisting height of 340 meters. It is equipped with 16 sets of 30-meter heavy-duty escalators and three sets of 20-meter ones. These escalators running directly from Tianmen Hole to the top of Tianmen Mountain.
This escalator is really incredible, total 8 long escalator section to the upper mouth of Tianmen Cave and another 7 long escalator section to the bottom of Tianmen Cave. The first 8 section is already include in the ticket price, but for next 7 section you should buy ticket for 32 cny at the counter near upper mouth of Tianmen Cave. If you don’t want buy ticket then you could walk down the 999 stair.
Since it’s cloudy so we can’t see anything, both upper and bottom Tianmen Cave is covered by thick fog. Not long in there we take a bus out to the city and back to Mini Inn to get our bag for heading to Train station.
We take train from Zhangjiajie to Huaihua for 4 hours long (K473, 38 cny per person for hard seat) and then continue with sleeper train (K580, 254 cny per person for hard sleeper) from Huaihua to Chengdu East for 13.5 hours. From Chengdu East we take Airport Shuttle Bus line 3 for 12 cny per person to Shuangliu Airport with 1 stop.
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