Huanglong Cave Half-Day Tour, Underground River Boat Ride in the “Underground Pearl”

Huanglong Cave runs for several kilometres on multiple levels beneath the hills outside Wulingyuan, and it's the natural counterweight to Zhangjiajie's clifftop days cool, level and entirely indoors. The route moves through a series of chambers on raised walkways, past forests of stalactites and stalagmites built up over millions of years, some of them well over 20 metres tall.

The centrepiece is a boat ride along an underground river, where you drift through narrow water passages before the chamber opens out into one of the cave's great halls. The lighting throughout is theatrical rather than subtle coloured floods on the formations which is either charming or overdone depending on your taste, but it makes the scale legible in a way plain white light wouldn't.

Because it's a half day and requires no real climbing, this works well on your arrival day in Zhangjiajie, or as a rest day between the mountain parks. Temperature inside stays around 16°C year-round, so bring a layer even in midsummer.