Day 2 in the Hunan Province.

Ah, our second day in the immensely large park at Zhangjiajie and while the weather still wasn't great, at least it wasn't raining. It was a long day, and I'm tired just thinking about it as we walked at least 15 km as we toured the area. That said I'm just going to dump a lot of photos for you all to enjoy and not fill this post with too much text.

The starting point in the morning.

We walked along a stream for the first 7km of the tour, looking up at the towering formations.

Here is one that is taller then some of the others - everybody get a photo.

After finishing the first walk we grabbed a cable car to the top of one of the mountains so that we could then do a 4km sightseeing loop.

Going up...

When we first got to the top it was crowded with Chinese tour groups, all talking into their amplified speaker sets as everyone crowded into tiny viewing platforms. Not fun, but after two of these overlooks the tour groups take a shortcut back and head back down. We probably only see a total of 25 people during the next hour and a half of our tour.

Empty walkway at a major Chinese tourist site.

And monkeys too...

After we take the cable car back down we walk out a second entrance of the park and zip into town for a quick lunch before heading out on a three hour drive to Wang village where we would be spending the night. When we arrived the hotel, actually the whole main street, had no power. Doing inspections we were told and it was set to return at 19:00, we figured we would be lucky if it was on by 20:00. While we still had some daylight we wandered down through the old section of the town down to the pier at the river, the old section is also somewhat touristy and this area had power in their stores.
We returned to the hotel shortly after dark to find that they had power for half of their first floor, good enough for us to order some beers and pull out our travel scrabble to pass the time. Power was returned to the street around 20:30 so we wandered down the and picked up some noodles and beers at the local store to enjoy as our dinner back in the hotel room before heading to bed.

Power went off again at 06:30 that morning, so we managed to get up and dressed by the small amount of early morning light that came in our window before heading out on the next leg of our tour.