The next day dawned wet. Very wet. In fact it was pouring rain. Not ones to be scared away by a little wetness, we unpacked our raincoats and headed out. We decided to take the bus back to the east entrance, possibly buying a little time so that the rain would let up. It did not.
After much map consulation, we decided to take the Monkey’s garden trail, sounds innoucuous enough. The trail was depicted as a yellow line, same as the one we took the day before, so we figured it would be a similar walk low in the valley. An attendant at the park gate confirmed this for us.
In contrast to the day before, we were the only ones on this trail. The rain was somewhat abating and the air was warm, so we were content. The scenery was lush and green with beautiful bridges here and there.

This happens to be a pivotal photo of our day. The steps on the right are the first set of stairs that we had encountered. They continued on the left of the bridge, and then continued again. At every bend of the trail was a new set of stairs. We reasoned that perhaps we were just climbing alongside this small stream and that it would even out eventually. No, this was not the case. In this situation, at some point one must come to a decision; go up further, or down? Since we had a good 8 hours of rain previous to that moment, the unbeaten path of the stairs was quite mossy and slippery. We thought it best to keep going up. After all, this was supposed to be an ‘easy’ trail wasn’t it?
The rain did stop and we got to a few viewpoints along the way. We were, indeed, climbing way up. Some of the viewpoints were more dangerous than others, we gave this one a wide berth.

We came to a beautiful archway on our hike, and the first people we had seen all morning. This must mean we are near the top, we thought excitedly!

Then we climbed some more, and hit the cloud level.

The trail got busier with tour groups coming down to the nearby viewpoints, and finally we made it to the top! We had climbed 3,878 stairs to the top of Mt. Tianzi at 1262.5 metres. The total climb was about 750 metres or 2300 feet. This was Emily’s first peak on her own, we are so proud of her; she had a great time and did not complain once. I must say it was supremely tough for me, as my legs are not what they used to be, but I persevered. Madeline did the climb most of the way in the backpack (way to go Simon) but climbed many of the stairs near the top. The Chinese people were amazed to see two young girls tromping up the long staircases.

We did know, however, that there was a gondola waiting for us at the end; and we hoped that the map was wrong once again and would be taking us down instead of up some more as it had indicated. The gondola (with 26 more freakin’ steps to get to it, bringing the afternoon’s total to 3904!!!) ride was amazing. It was like we were flying on one of the prehistoric birds from the movie Avatar.


If this wasn’t exciting enough, we then had only 45 minutes to make it to our train. We ended up in Wulingyuan again, so had to find a taxi to take us to Zhangjiajie village, grab our backpacks from the hotel lobby, and drive down to Zhangjiajie city to get the train.

Remember the aforementioned tunnels? It was crazy.



We were warmly greeted at the Huaihua train station by one of the hospital’s drivers and welcomed back with open arms by the staff who were still at work. It was very touching and we feel that we are a part of the family of this hospital. What an adventure this has been!