5-Day Shennongjia and Yichang: from the Forest to the Gorges

Morning - to Yichang
Yichang is where the Yangtze leaves the mountains and enters the plain, and it has been a garrison town and a port at the mouth of the gorges for two thousand years. The train from Wuhan is about two hours. Your guide has the dam visit pre-registered: the Three Gorges Dam site is free to enter but you must reserve, you must carry your passport, and you travel around the site on the official shuttle because private vehicles are not admitted to the restricted area.

Afternoon - the dam
The dam is 2,335 metres long and 185 metres tall, holding a reservoir that runs 660 kilometres back up the river. Construction started in 1994, the river was closed in 1997, the first generators ran in 2003, and the ship lift - the last major piece - opened in 2016. There are three viewpoints on the standard circuit. Tanziling looks down on the whole works from the south. The 185 platform is at the crest height of the dam, so you are standing level with the top of the wall, looking upstream into the reservoir and downstream over the spillway. And the memorial park at the downstream face gives you the scale of the spillway gates and the powerhouse.

The numbers your guide will give you are the ones worth having: 32 main turbines plus two plant-power units, a total installed capacity of 22,500 megawatts, and annual generation that has exceeded 100 terawatt-hours in a good year. The navigation works are the other half - a five-stage ship lock that passes vessels of up to 10,000 tonnes through a 113-metre change in level, and the vertical ship lift, which takes 3,000-tonne ships up the same height in about 40 minutes instead of three and a half hours. On the other side of the ledger: 1.3 million people were resettled, and the reservoir drowned towns, archaeological sites and a great deal of farmland. A good guide says both.

Evening
Back in Yichang for dinner on the river. The local fish - the Yangtze's own, now mostly farmed since the 2020 fishing ban on the main stem - and the red-oil noodles of Yichang are both on the table, and the guide orders a mild version alongside.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.

Morning - west and up
The high-speed line west out of Yichang crosses into the mountains within twenty minutes and Xingshan station is about forty minutes out. From there the road climbs: Shennongjia is a forestry district, not a city, and the inhabited parts sit between about 900 and 1,700 metres in a landscape of steep, forested ridges with almost no flat ground. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016 as a natural property, and it is the only one Hubei has.

Guanmen Mountain
Guanmen Shan, the first valley on the way in, is the reserve's introduction: a gorge with a road and a path up it, holding the collections and research stations rather than the high scenery. What is here is the botany and the zoology of the region in condensed form - the endemic and relict species, the medicinal herb garden that justifies the name Shennong (the Divine Farmer, who is said to have tested plants here), the golden snub-nosed monkey enclosure, and the giant salamander breeding station, which is worth seeing: Andrias davidianus grows to over a metre and a half and is critically endangered in the wild.

Lunch
In Muyu, the small town at the foot of the reserve, or at the valley entrance. The mountain cooking is simple: smoked pork, wild mushrooms, river fish, and the potato that is the staple up here because rice does not grow at this altitude.

Afternoon
The rest of the day is paced to the altitude. Your guide will usually add the Shennong Altar - a modern memorial complex to the Divine Farmer, with a giant statue above the valley - or simply leave the afternoon open, because the following day starts early and the light at Shennong Peak is a morning thing.

Evening
Dinner in Muyu. Nights here are cold even in August; bring a layer.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Muyu town or Pingqian, Shennongjia.

Early start
Shennong Peak is 3,106 metres and it is the highest point in central China. The road up from Muyu takes about an hour and a half and the last section is a stair. Going early is not optional if you want to see anything: the cloud comes up from the valleys by mid-morning and stays, and on maybe one day in three the summit is in clear air.

The summit and Banbiyan
At the top are the stone pillars of Banbiyan, a karst stone forest at over 2,500 metres, and below it the sub-alpine belt: fir and birch, rhododendron that flowers in May and June, and the bamboo understorey. The vegetation zones stack vertically here in a way that is unusual at this latitude, which is precisely why the site was inscribed - the property protects one of the most species-rich temperate forests anywhere, and a long list of plants that survived the Pleistocene glaciations in these valleys and nowhere else.

The golden snub-nosed monkey lives in the fir-bamboo belt. It is endemic to a small area of central and south-west China, it is endangered, and seeing it is a matter of luck and of going with someone who knows where the troops have been feeding. Your guide will be straight with you about the odds rather than promising it.

Lunch
Carried or at the simple restaurant on the peak circuit. There is not much choice up here and the guide orders the smoked pork and the potato.

Afternoon
Down through the valleys - the boardwalk at the Primeval Forest, and the viewpoints over the ridges - and back to Muyu. If the group has the energy, the short trail at the Shennong Valley rim is the best hour of walking in the district.

Evening
Dinner in Muyu.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Muyu town or Pingqian, Shennongjia.

Very early start
Dajiu Lake sits in a basin at about 1,700 metres on the western side of the district - a meadow wetland of nine interconnected lakes with the mountains standing around it in a ring and no outlet that anybody used to be able to find, which is why the water sits and why the mist forms. It is the most photographed place in Shennongjia, and it is worth the four o'clock start: the mist is on the water from first light until about eight, and after that it is an ordinary pretty lake.

The wetland
The site is a peat bog with a boardwalk running through it, and the ecology is the interest: sphagnum, the sedge and reed communities, the deer park on the far side where the sika are kept semi-wild, and the birdlife - the lakes are on a migration route and the spring and autumn passages bring through waterfowl that do not stop anywhere else in Hubei. The nine lakes are named and numbered, and the walk between the first four takes about an hour.

Lunch
At Pingqian, the small settlement at the wetland entrance, which exists almost entirely to serve the wetland's visitors.

Afternoon
Back over the ridge and down to Muyu, or onward if the day is a transfer day. The road west from Dajiu Lake connects to the Wuxi and Chongqing side; the road east goes back down to Xingshan.

Evening
Dinner where you are staying.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Muyu town or Pingqian, Shennongjia.

Morning - Tianyan
Tianyan, the Swallow's Nest, is a short boardwalk circuit through the forest on the way out - a limestone ravine, a bridge over a waterfall, and the swifts that nest in the rock faces and give the place its name. An hour, mostly flat, and a reasonable last walk if the weather on the high ground has not cooperated.

The road out
Then the descent. The road from Muyu down to Xingshan drops about 1,200 metres in under two hours on a properly engineered but relentlessly twisting mountain road, and this is why we do not let clients self-drive it: the gradients, the blind corners, the tour buses on the inside line and the fog that comes up without warning make it a job for a professional driver who has done it a hundred times.

Lunch and onward
Lunch on the road, and then either south-east to Yichang - about three and a half hours in total, arriving in time for the river - or north-east to Wudangshan, which is a longer day at about five hours and is best broken at Shiyan. Your guide will have told you which the night before and will have the next day's train or site reservation in hand.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang or at the foot of Wudangshan.