Rock formations

A couple of weekends ago I went with a neighbor on what was going to be a long day trip to a Chinese national park that was about an hour flight from Shanghai. Amusingly, I got the idea to go to this place from an online article in the New York Times travel section. I read the Times on the web each day. As far as I can tell it appears to be almost entirely uncensored by the Chinese government. Most days there is at least one article on China or something Chinese in the paper and very rarely do they get blocked. Web censorship occurs not by doing any selective deletion from articles, but by simply blocking entire web pages so that when you hit a link to a story on China the page just won't appear.

In any case, given that the trip to this place was a lot easier for us to pull off than it was for the average citizen of the Tri-State area, and since our families were both out of town, we decided to give it a try. One of the interesting differences between US and Chinese air fare structures worked in our favor. In the US, if you book early you can get the best fares, but in China it's the opposite. Many airlines don't release their discounted fares until a week to 10 days before a flight is scheduled to take off and the fares seem to drop even further during the day or two before the flight actually takes off. The place, called Zhangjiajie, was filled with lots of large natural stone pillars, sort of like a less colorful, but much lusher version of Bryce Canyon in Utah. It's the kind of geography that shows up in a lot of Chinese paintings. In the morning the temperature was great -- about 75°. By the afternoon it heated up a bit but it wasn't nearly as hot as Shanghai. We ended up doing a long hike down a narrow canyon next to river in the morning, then took a cable car up to a higher elevation part of the park and then later another cable car down to another area. Towards the end of the afternoon we did a hike that was on a trail that was essentially a staircase carved into the side of the mountain. We went straight up for probably an hour and a half. It was literally just climbing stairs for an hour and a half. Almost no flat stretches. I turn 40 in about a month and while I am in relatively good shape, I can’t scamper up the side of a mountain like I might've when I was 25. The hike was very pretty, but by the end I was totally hammered and my legs were little bit wobbly. Our flight didn't leave until 10 p.m. so we took a bus into town and wandered around for a little while you're at it this is a relatively small city by Chinese standards -- probably 1.5 million people. It's also a long way off the western manufacturing path so the city itself is very Chinese. In Shanghai you see quite a few signs that are in Chinese characters but also have English or Pinyin, which is a transliteration of the Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet. Zhangjiajie had almost no signs with any English or Pinyin.

But the real action started after we got to the airport. It turned out that there had been a big thunderstorm in Shanghai and so the plane that was supposed to pick us up never left Shanghai and they just canceled the flight. It was not great news to get when you're exhausted after a long day of hiking. The funniest part came when we realized that not only was the airline not providing any sort of hotel or transportation, but the airport staff had locked the doors to the airport so no one could leave. When I was a bit younger I spent many a night in strange countries sleeping in very sketchy and unhygienic circumstances, but the exoticism of spending a hot and humid night with 500 fellow travelers sleeping on a dirty linoleum floor in an airport with no central air conditioning doesn't have the appeal that it once did.

Fortunately, I traced my way back through security checks and metal detectors, which were all turned off, and found that the doors to the security were only closed by small sliding bolts. On a somewhat frightening side note, the airlines would check in whole groups of tourists by letting their tour guide just bring up a stack of ID cards and issuing the tickets for the stack. – no visual check of the passengers. Anyway, I undid one of the security gates, figuring that if I got in trouble I could always pull the confused foreigner card, and walked out into the main lobby where we found an open door to the outside. As we were headed out the door a bunch of people saw that we had escaped and began to follow our lead, pouring out of the airport. We managed to grab the last cab and found a hotel back in the town about midnight that had a couple of rooms with air conditioners. Our flight back to Shanghai didn’t leave until 10:30am the next morning since the plane had to come from Shanghai.