Our first bullet train took us from Chongqing to Zhangjiajie - the Avatar mountain place. Since the bullet train system is relatively new, the stations are weird. Like massive empty airports with loads of platforms and no people on them. They have a slightly eerie, liminal space feel. But I love that kind of thing, so that suited me.

You can research Zhangjiajie forest park to your heart's content, but once you get there you just take the shuttle busses around a loop. We were lulled into a false sense of security on our first day, when we went to the southern bit. There were a few tourists here and there, a nice pretty walk around the bottom of the stacks, some companion monkeys. A lovely, scenic, chilled experience.

The second day, the northern bit of the park, was a whole other story. We got to what I guess was the main hub, with about a billion other people, joined an enormous queue, and hoped for the best. Luckily, the best happened and we got on a bus that brought us to the top. While I'm not known for my appreciation of nature, or the outdoors in general, I can safely say the stacks in Zhangjiajie forest park are the most spectacular nature I've ever seen. You feel like you're in Star Wars (or, of course, Avatar. But I've only seen that once and not even in 3D because I missed it in the cinema). Yes, there is a lot of funnelling around the narrow bridgeways at the top but everyone gets a view because you're all on the side of a mountain. It was a cloudy day, but not terrible, and honestly looking down at the patches of clouds just made the whole thing more surreal.

In Zhangjiajie, I noticed how incredible the general infrastructure in China is. Not just the bullet trains (which are so impressive), but there were clean public toilets absolutely everywhere. The mobile Internet signal was always better than Edinburgh, even when you were up a massive mountain. It had changed a lot in the 10 years since I'd been there. But Alipay and WeChat are still garbage. Speaking of which, I did at one point notice a random app appear on my phone, and then vanish a day later.

Tianmen Mountain is (relatively) close. On our third day, we were getting our second bullet train to Fenghuang, but not until the evening. So we went to Tianmen Mountain first. It's that famous one with the hole in it that absolute nutjobs wing suit through.

Of course we couldn't see any of that because there was 100% cloud cover. But we did it all anyway. Including climbing the 999 steps of the so-called Stairway to Heaven. There was an optional escalator that I made a strong, but not strong enough, case for. At the top (heaven, I guess?) the clouds were even more cloudy but we did the loop. It's actually quite a long walk, though I had no real sense of it.

We also got the scenic ski lift, which is a terrifying open-air metal seat that takes you across dense clouds for 20 minutes.

The glass walkway is cool, but again probably cooler on a clear day.

We got the escalator back down. It was about 16 escalators and I started to feel like I was going to be on an escalator for the rest of my life.