We only had a couple of hours to admire the charming town of Fenghuang in Hunan province of China. Our bus is leaving soon. We already had our lunch of deep fried stuff. We took a cab from the main road parallel to the Tuo River that brought us to the bus station which is departing for our next destination. The bus station itself isn’t really impressive since it is just a parking lot for the buses for now. Maybe in a few years they government will convert this into a real bus terminal similar to what they have done with the other provinces.
The four to five hour ride to Zhangjiajie was uneventful. It was pretty the same all throughout. We still traveled along well paved roads winding across the mountains of Hunan. It was really quite picturesque and to think that this place is virtually nowhere. About halfway into the trip, we stopped just after going through a tunnel bored through a mountain. Since China obviously has a lot of mountains it is inevitable that they need to dig through some mountains to cut short travel time.
The stopover was just a place for the driver to park the bus. While keeping a close eye on our bus, we also made our way down the bus to stretch our limbs. Even though we just sit in the bus, it is quite exhausting to be travelling from one place to another, especially in a place as big as China. Apparently, our bus gets really dusty from all the traveling that we have been doing. The windshield is especially dirty and of course we do not want a dirty windshield.
The driver started to hose down our bus while we looked on. There was a tall waterfall just beyond the tunnel on the side of the mountain. I have no idea whether it was natural or not but it was a refreshing sight from all the mountains that we have been seeing. This is probably where all the water from the hose is coming from.
Any decent stopover will always have a toilet. In this case, an old granny was standing guard outside the toilet to collect money for the use of the toilet. Payment is just one yuan. Although it seems like your one yuan won’t get you much in the way of comfort in this part of Hunan. The toilet was dark and the cubicles we only waist high. Although I have been here in China for a week I still have to get used to their toilets. One may think that the money is used for maintenance of the toilet but it was smelly and not very clean. I just did my business there and got out of it.
At the rate that we are going we should reach our destination by nightfall. I was beginning to worry about how to find our intended residence but I guess we’ll cross the bridge when we get there.
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