During our trip to Hunan we stopped in a few places, Heaven’s door also called Tianmenshan in Chinese was one of the highlights of our trip.
After spending some days at the Zhangjiajie National Park, we head to the city and went straight away to our hotel to leave our luggage. We stayed in the backpacker’s area and spent one night in a very affordable hotel. The same day we went directly to Tianmenshan.
At the door we had in hand our passports and phones ready to translate any questions in Chinese.
Since we are foreigners we had to fill a very long-form explaining where we live and when we entered the country, etc. A few minutes later we had our tickets and we could move forward.
Bad news, we had the drone with us and it is not allowed to bring this device inside the park. We had to leave our drone at the entrance in a very exposed big “locker” so keep this in mind if you own a drone and visit Heaven’s door.
Once you are all set up you enter to the cable car area, this ride is around 28 minutes long and the view gets better and better when you approach the top of the mountain.
There are different variations and routes, we decided to take the cable car first, walk down the 999 stairs, take another cable car down (in the opposite side) and finally take a bus that takes you to point A. You can do all this the way around but that means you walk the 999 steps to the top.
The cable car ride to the top was one of the nicest I ever had, the landscape is just beautiful and invites you to take many many pictures.
After 28 minutes we arrived at the top and start walking around, there are a lot of things to do, temples to visit, etc. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time and the weather was not helping at all, we had rain our entire time there.
So we went straight to the point and walk to Heaven’s gate. Before that you have to take some staircases to the top of heavens gate, this means that the gate is not the highest point here. The way down there is very long and we counted more than 7 staircases, so this was a bit boring because it is indoor.
After some minutes we arrived finally at the door, it was so foggy that we couldn’t see at all. Once we were walking down the starts we could see some light and the clouds moving through the gate, this was a real magical moment.
We walked around for some minutes, enjoy the view and head back to the cable car that would take us down. This cable car is really big and the capacity is for more than 50 people. Once down we took the minibus that drives back to point A. From here we took a taxi to our hotel, took a very hot shower and rest a little bit.
5 interesting facts about Tianmenshan:
1. Tianmenshan cable car is one of the longest in the world.
2. There are red ribbons hanging from the trees, in Chinese culture is believed that doing this your wishes will come true.
3. There are 999 steps to the heavens door.
4. With 99 curves on the Tongtian Highway, the road that takes you to this place instead of the cable car. There are many videos online from Formula 1 guys driving here.
5. Tianmen cave is it’s the highest hole of its sort in the world.