My sister and I decided to use Jeffrey Tang Ming as our guide to explore the vast national parks and UNESCO World Heritage site of Zhangjiajie and Wulingyuan in Hunan Province, China during 7 to 10 Nov 2019.
Navigating to the best of the sites in the 154 square mile Wulingyuan Scenic Area which is bisected throughout by mountain ranges requires either lots of time or in depth research and knowledge. Although my sister and I grew up in Asia and are comfortable navigating Asian crowds and sites, being with Jeffrey was like adding a timely human GPS to our trip.
Despite the low season timing, we almost always avoided crowds at the sites because Jeffrey would take us a different way and of course he knew where the most beautiful settings were.
Given the complexity of needing to have transportation from the exterior of each park section to the exterior of the next park section (because there is no cross-park transportation among the various composite parks – only inner park public transport) having Jeffrey’s wife as our exterior park driver provided seamless flow with no down time during our nine hour days.
With decades devoted to tourists and 15 years dedicated solely to escorting foreigners in China, Jeffrey was an excellent guide with impeccable English and manners. He would make an excellent and patient guide for any size group or situation; my sister and I are mid-sixties avid bird and landscape photographers and Jeffrey showed great patience with our frequent delays. (We were his first-ever birders!) Jeffrey was flexible according to our needs, flipping our first day’s schedule to accommodate my sister’s late arrival in town. Although we outlined what we wanted to see in advance, I believe we could have said we have four days and he would have created a similar itinerary.
Jeffery’s major expertise lies in Zhangjiajie and Fenghuang, which are key tourist sites but time-consuming to travel to. However, he also escorts foreigners throughout China and as a result some of his clients published books and photographs focused on isolated locations.
At the end of our four days we estimated we shared 80,000 footsteps with Jeffrey and it was definitely time well spent.
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