Inspiration for the Avatar movie

We spent three days exploring Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, armed with a three-day ticket and absolutely no preparation for what we were about to witness. The moment we stepped into the park, it became immediately obvious why James Cameron had based Pandora on this place — towering sandstone pillars rose thousands of metres straight up from the earth, wreathed in mist and cloud, so impossibly vertical and dramatic that they looked like they'd been planted by some giant gardener rather than carved by millions of years of erosion. Walking the trails felt like wandering through an alien landscape, except it was real, solid beneath our feet, and utterly, breathtakingly magnificent.

The scale of it was what got us — the way those massive columns just kept appearing through the fog, each one dwarfing the next, stretching up into the clouds so that you couldn't even see where they ended. We'd turn a corner and gasp involuntarily because another vista would unfold, and then another, each one more spectacular than the last. The air felt thick and damp, carrying the mineral smell of wet rock and ancient forest, and the sound of water dripping and flowing echoed constantly around us. Other tourists clustered at the viewpoints with their cameras, but somehow the scale was so enormous that even surrounded by crowds it felt intimate and private, just us and those impossible mountains.