The karst spire was once known as “South Pillar of the Heaven” (南天一柱), or “Pillar between Heaven and Earth” (乾坤柱). It lies within the National Forest Park, a world heritage site visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists — mostly Chinese, Korean and Japanese so far — each year.

And yes, when I saw the movie I said to myself, “Damn. It looks like Zhangjiajie!” You can see my photos on Picasaweb to see what I mean.

So, Avatar fans here’s the lowdown on the National Forest Park in Zhangjiajie. The quickest way to get there is by air from Beijing — one-way airfares are about 900 RMB (about $130) but sometimes you can get cheaper fares. Entry to the park itself is 248 RMB ($36) for a two-day pass. You will need both days, because the park is both big and worth a leisurely visit. Bring water to drink and food to snack on, but DO NOT carry it in a white plastic grocery bag. The local monkeys will literally try to steal the food from the bags. Use a backpack instead. The monkeys aren’t good with zippers … yet.

You can find accommodations just outside the park for very reasonable prices. There are lower priced hotels in the city, but you have to factor in the hour-long bus or taxi ride between downtown and the park. Being just outside the gate is much more convenient.

Meanwhile, some theaters in China have pulled the 2D version of Avatar to make way for Confucius, starring Chow Yun Fat, prompting allegations that the state media authority is railroading the foreign-made movie out of theaters in favor of the domestic variety. Officials, however, say the 2D version is drawing less at the box office than the 3D flick, which justifies the switch.

Sounds like protectionism to me.

This weekend was the May Day holiday, which I and a friend spent in Zhangjiajie at the home of our mutual friend. The three of us had a good time touring some beautiful country, but the scenery was not the only thing impressive about the trip. It was the people we met.

Weeks ago, Nora had invited Ailsa and me to spent the weekend at Nora’s home. With no classes on Friday, we decided to leave campus on the 9 pm train on Thursday. The train was predictably crowded with northbound holiday travelers, and we had no seats. [The Chinese rail system will sell you tickets even after all seats have been booked. China Railways figures you'll either make do standing or whangle a way to sit down.]

We walked toward the rear of the train until we could go no further. There were no seats, but by chance we ended up next to a group traveling together to Zhengzhou. They were feeling pretty mellow after downing some baijiu (aka “white wine”), so when two of them left to smoke on the end of the carriage, they gave their seats up and everyone scrunched together to make room. [It also helps that one of us was a white-haired Westerner; I get preferential treatment because of both age and exotic-ness.]

The Zhengzhou group included a woman who was just four years younger than I, two younger men and two men who were maybe in their mid-40′s. None of them were fall-down drunk, but they were garrulous — albeit in Chinese. Nora and Ailsa served as translators as the ZZ travelers asked me to drink some wine (I did, but not too much) and the woman asked me to pose with her for not one, but easily 20 photos. [She never seemed satisfied with the way she looked in the previous 19. I also wondered if she wasn't subtly hitting on me]

These pastimes kept us happily occupied as our train, a local, crawled its way toward Zhangjiajie. Local trains stop at every station and have to yield right-of-way to the faster trains. So, ours pulled onto sidings at least four times (I lost count), taking nearly three and a half hours to cover 125 km. Did I mention this train was not air-conditioned?

Friday was pretty much a bust in terms of sight-seeing, since the rain poured down all day. So, on Saturday morning, when it was clear the rain had stopped, the three of us were more than ready to get out and about.

We grabbed a quick breakfast, and hopped the #8 bus to visit a reservoir lake Nora had visited in the past. We sat in the back of the bus, and soon Nora and were chatting with a woman sitting directly in front of us. As it turns out, she (Kerry Wang) was a Changsha native who had come to Zhangjiajie to be a tour guide to Chinese clients several years ago. She is keen to improve her English so she can also guide foreigners, and said she was excited to see me, a westerner, on the same bus as she.

Kerry and Ailsa are both from Changsha, so the Chinese hometown hail-fellow-well-met mode kicked in. Like Americans, Chinese people travel far and wide within their country to find work. Unlike Americans (or at least unlike me), the ties they have to their hometowns are deep and long lasting. So anyone from the same city, town, village or wide spot on the road is immediately considered family. So it was that Kerry offered to be our tour guide for the day, gratis, since she was off work on a year’s maternity leave. [Yes, American women, I said a year's leave. Jealous?]

Our first stop, the reservoir, offered boat rides from the Xiang Ren Xi dam to the other end of the lake where sightseers can hike along the river. One boat already had four passengers, university students who were patiently (?) waiting for the captain to decide when he had enough passengers to make it worth his while to leave. Three of the students were, coincidentally, from Changsha, so the hometown ties-that-bind sprang into action as we shared our snacks and brief introductions.

As the boat set off finally, a young couple hollered for passage and the captain came about to pick them up. The young man was an art student in Zhangjiajie and his artist girlfriend was visiting from Shandong for the week.

We all became pretty good friends that morning, agreeing to eat lunch together at a noodle place after our boat ride and morning hike and to visit another scenic spot, Lao Dao Wan, that Kerry knew about. It would offer the same kind of spectacular sights as other more touristy places near the city.

Rather than take a bus then hike to our destination, Kerry and the local art student found two neighborhood men willing to transport us in their vehicles, a minivan and an open air tuk-tuk. [A tuk-tuk is a three-wheeler with a motorcycle's front end and a drive axle in the rear. Ours had two facing bench seats a little longer then the fender "seats" in the back of an old Jeep CJ.] Adventurers as we are, the art students, Nora, Ailsa and I all wanted to ride in the tuk-tuk.

The air was fresh and clean-smelling after the heavy rain, and the temperature was cool and refreshing, so we had a great time as our noble steed jounced along the road to Lao Dao Wan. We had just gotten off to start our hike to the entrance to Lao Dao Wan when another minivan pulled up, and its surprising cargo hopped out.

The American hometown mode now kicked in, as one of the new arrivals was Gary, an American English teacher in Zhangjiajie, and his girlfriend, Karen. Gary, a Trenton, New Jersey, native, recently coached basketball at Mercer County Community College. Karen used to work at the Princeton University U-Store. And I (if you didn’t know) went to Princeton, which like MCCC is in Mercer County. Instant bonding.

We hiked together to the entrance, crossing the river several times on conveniently placed rocks, only to wait while Kerry and Nora negotiated ticket prices with the operators. The original prices were 13 yuan for the Chinese students and 23 yuan for the three foreigners. Persistence paid off, as we all only had to pay only 13, but the haggling took up time the four uni students did not have. They left with Kerry, who had invited Nora, Ailsa, the two art students and me to her house for dinner and now needed time to prepare.

Gary is as garrulous while sober as the ZZ crowd on the inbound train was while tipsy, so we had a great traveling “English corner” as we climbed up and down and around the cuts the river had made through the foothills of Tianmenshan, the mountain beside Zhangjiajie city.

Someone needs to rate Chinese scenic hiking trails like US rivers are rated for whitewater rafting. On a difficulty scale of 5, this particular hike was about a 4. If you are afraid of heights, rivers crossings on slick rocks and steep muddy slopes, skip Lao Dao Wan. Some segments of the trail would scare the willies out of Americans used to liability-proofed tourist magnets. The paths along the canyon walls and hillsides consisted of steel rebar steps driven into the rock with chains as handrails or bamboo ramps and railings. Under these circumstances, hikers have to to be as surefooted as mountain goats and similarly unperturbed by precipitous drops along near-vertical slopes.

Our guide followed us, but we were not entirely sure what he would have done in an emergency. None of our cell phones had signals in this deep divide.

On reflection, I still would have done the hike. The best scenery is the kind you have to work to find, and this area has not yet fallen prey to the crowds and the rampant commercialism of the Zhangjiajie Forest Park and Fenghuang.

After the hike, Gary and his party went their way, and we five tuk-tuked back into town, then hopped the #8 bus to Kerry’s side of town for dinner. The plan was for Kerry to cook Changsha style, Nora to cook Zhangjiajie style and XiaoDan (the girl from Shandong) to cook her style. I invited Mike, an English major I know from the Zhangjiajie campus, to join us and we shared a scrumptious meal and an evening of English and Chinese conversation. We all were acting like old friends who hadn’t seen each other for years, but in fact the majority of us had met for the first time that very day.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what impressed me most about the weekend. Few Americans would invite six complete strangers to their house for dinner, and few strangers would have accepted the offer. But we did, and were that much richer for it.

A little trust and friendship go a long way. More of us should try both.

The Buddha sits among a coterie of lesser buddhas in a rebuilt temple at the summit of Tianmen Mountain near Zhangjiajie, on the site of a much older temple dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907). My visit there was one of the highlights of a quick, impromptu trip to Zhangjiajie this weekend.

The occasion for trip, despite less than encouraging weather, was to meet the new foreign teacher at the Zhangjiajie airport Saturday evening. David, my liaison officer, asked if I wanted to accompany one of his interns, Christopher, on the trip. I said, sure, thinking anything has to better than sitting in my flat on a cool, damp weekend.

We caught a morning train, and arrived at the university’s Zhangjiajie campus hotel around 1 pm, parked our bags, and took a short, wet walking tour of the campus. Christopher has friends on this campus, and I have a friend and former colleague who teaches there, so we spent some time organizing our stay.

The new teacher from the UK was supposed to arrive at 8 pm, but Connie (my friend) invited me to dinner. So, Christopher and I decided he would go to the airport alone. As it turns out, for me, it was the right decision. The teacher did not make the evening flight, so Christopher didn’t go and instead hung out with his friends while I visited with Connie and her family.

The food was delicious, but I felt guilty that I could not eat very much. I woke up Saturday with an upset stomach, which plagued me the entire weekend. So my appetite was off, to say the least.

After dinner, Connie’s husband and his colleague had to return to work for some overtime (until midnight, as it turned out.) So, Connie gave me a quick tour of Zhangjiajie’s bustling downtown.

My students in Jishou misinformed me. They had given me the impression that Zhangjiajie had no shops, no restaurants and no karaoke clubs, and that Zhangjiajie students came to Jishou for entertainment. Maybe they do, but the part of the city I saw was certainly no sleepy backwater. I figure my students meant the area around the campus is devoid of entertainment and shopping opportunities, which is true to a large extent.

Anyway, we walked in the rain, looking at shops and popping into a local hypermarket, while Connie told me about the museums and other cultural sites of her hometown.

Zhangjiajie is a city of about 1.5 million people. Until the late 1990s, it was known as Dayong (Google Maps still lists it that way), a sleepier and less well known town. The creation of a national park, Wulingyuan, nearby changed all that; the park acquired the name of a small village, Zhangjiajie, within its borders. By extension, that name eventually replaced Dayong as the name of the city.

Now, Zhangjiajie is a busy tourist town that attracts 6 million visitors — mostly Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, so far — annually. They visit the scenic forest, Tianmen Mountain, local museums and several other natural and cultural sites all within short trips of the city. Express trains and a new airport bring people in from the larger cities to the east and south.

To see all of those sites in a weekend is impossible. We hoped that the rain would let up enough for me to at least take the cable car ride up to the top of Tianmen Mountain, which overlooks the city. By Sunday afternoon, it had.

Sunday morning, while we waited for the clouds to lift, Connie took me to the Xiahuashanguan Museum, which features the art and culture of her people, the Tujia.

China has 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities. The Tujia number about 8 million. They have inhabited this part of China (the Wuling Mountain Range) for millenia, and have cultivated special arts and crafts known through the country, including sandstone painting, weaving, embroidery, intricate woodcarvings, courtship songs, and dances. Many of these traditions have been revived with the creation of the national park.

As the museum is privately run, I did not feel it appropriate to take photos. Their cross-stitch embroidery is dumbfounding in its intricacy; I doubt photos would really convey the craftsmanship anyway.

I have a vague notion from my childhood endeavors how time consuming wood carving. Imagine carving an entire bed. The “dripping-water bed” is a poetic name for a married couple’s first (and probably only) bed. Artisans make these matrimonial “beds of a thousand labors” from wood, carving intricate designs all around the borders of the “entrance” to the bed. Connie said her grandmother had one, which left a lasting impression on Connie when she slept in it as a child.

Similar efforts go into the making of the bride’s sedan chair, in which she arrives at her wedding concealed from view. The museum has two antique bride’s chairs, but apparently also has replicas available for modern Tujia to rent for a traditional wedding.

Sandstone painting, a newer artform, is somewhat of a misnomer. Created by a Zhangjiajie native, the artists combine pulverized sandstone with natural pigments and other natural materials to create unique, vividly colored and textured images of local scenery and village life. Here’s an example:

Around 2:30, we headed for the cableway terminus, just a few blocks from the train station. Connie called on two students to accompany up to the mountain, while she minded my bag and bought my train ticket home. [Christopher, I will note, was still at the hotel, bored silly, watching TV, and awaiting some news of the new teacher's arrival.]

The Tianmen Cableway is the longest in the world, at 7.5 km (about 4.7 miles). It carries visitors from the city to a point on the mountain 1.3 km — about 4,300 feet — up, where they can disembark and explore the mountaintop park on foot. Another cableway (really a chairlift) takes visitors another 200 meters up to the temple.

This multilingual site has a map of the cableway and the mountain forest park. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to trace our route.

Tianmen Mountain has much spiritual significance. The temple at the summit has been a center of Buddhism for western Hunan for 1400 years. Earlier than that, in the year 263, part of the mountain’s cliffs suddenly gave way, creating a keyhole, called Tianmen Cave; local people called it a gateway to heaven and it became an ancient tourist attraction. (Chinese unicorns are also reputed to live in the forests surrounding the mountain, but they are hard to spot even in clear weather.)

I took digital photos on the way up, but they offer a poor representation of the actual sights. Imagine if you will sitting in a glassed-in cablecar that seems to float above the buildings of the city, over the craggy terrains, the lush forests, and the switchback road (it has 99 turns and is said to resemble a dragon’s ascent) leading to the summit. Meanwhile, you apparently inch ever so slowly toward the mountain, its peak rimmed with low clouds.

The ride on the chairlift was even more vivid, as we actually passed through the chilly clouds on the way to the temple. Down below us, somewhere in the mist, were some Tujia women singing a courtship song for some other tourists. It had an ethereal quality that reminded me of scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon without Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh jumping from tree branch to tree branch. We waved at the people on the chairs heading down. The majority were Koreans, as it turned out.

The temple here was rebuilt according to the style typical of the Qing Dynasty four centuries ago. The first station is the south-facing gateway, where two ferocious looking figures stand to protect the Buddha. After that, there is a huge courtyard, flanked by two smaller buildings. The Buddha sits in the largest building on the grounds, directly opposite the gateway.

It is traditional to clasp one’s hands in front of your chest and bow three times before entering. In the middle of the temple, the golden Buddha and his two golden bodhisattvas (disciples) sit crosslegged looking serenely to the south. Each is about 15 feet tall. Small stools were placed in front of them for Buddhists wanting to pray.

Along the east and west walls are 18 statues representing the 18 luohans (supernatural beings with specific abilities), including happiness (the familiar laughing Buddha), scholarship, artistry, and so on. On the north side of the temple is the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, whom many Chinese regard as important as the Buddha himself, and two other guardians astride an elephant and a tiger.

On our way out, we saw a group of men carrying a huge bronze cauldron up the narrow stone steps to the main courtyard. The thing must have weighed close to a half-ton, judging from the grunts and groans of the ten porters struggling with it. It provided a brief glimpse into the time and effort it would have taken to build a such a huge temple complex centuries ago.

At this point, we really had to hustle. My train would leave at 6, and it was already past 4:30. The students wanted me to walk (“Quickly, we must hurry!”) the “plank road,” a stone walkway skirting the top of the mountain. While the views were spectacular, I really had to catch the train, so I suggested I come back another time to savor the experience.

I made it to the train just in time, as it was boarding. Connie talked her way past the security guards to lead me to the platform, and even boarded briefly to make sure I had good company in carriage 7, seat 51. My seatmates were all coincidentally Jishou University students, returning from celebrating a friend’s birthday. Two of them chatted with me in English to the admiring glances of several onlookers. Just before the train pulled from the station, Christopher breathlessly appeared, having gained permission from his boss to abandon meeting the new teacher for now.

So, from a sow’s ear, a silk purse. All things considered, I had a pretty damn good weekend.