Huaihua Travel Guide

Visit the old river town of Fenghuang, two hours by bus from Huaihua. Fenghuang is described elsewhere on VT. The bus station is on the west side of the City center. Going to Fenghuang is a must! You should stay in Fenghuang a minimum of one night. When you arrive at the bus station, there will be a lot of people approaching to offer a place to stay. Just follow and inspect what's on offer. Probably you'll get an acceptable room at an acceptableprice, and the landlords will most probably give lots of good advice about what to see, where to go, etc.
While you're there, you can visit a Miao-village some one hour away by bus.

Also, going to the nearby town of Zhijiang is a good idea. One day is enough. The Sino-american war memorial and museum is located there. (The old airfield has just recently been renovated to become a civilian airport).
In Zhijiang proper, there's a famous Dong minority "wind-and-rain bridge." It's quite impressive! Inside the brigde there are numerous shops, and four or five dentist consultancies. All the passers-by can stop and look down your throat and chat with the dentist while she fixes your tooth problem. The equipment is up-to-date.

To love Huaihua, you would need to be an afficionado of small Chinese cities. The city keeps its charms well hidden, and the Huaihua Museum was closed (seemingly indefinitely) when we were there.

The riverside area (actually there are two of them) is very rundown and infested with rubbish along the banks. Huiahua has well and truly turned its back on the waterfront: one stretch of recent speculative apartment buildings, painted bright pink, sits completely vacant alongside the main agricultural equipment market and the city power station. To the south, Huaihua's steel mill belches smoke. It's not the prettiest place in China!

However, the valleys to the north of Huaihua, on the road to Fenghuang and Jishou rapidly become pretty, descending down a long winding valley, past several derelict templesto wards Maiyan. This long valley would make excellent walking and desrves to be explored. The wooden buildings, many belonging to Miao and Tujia people, are mostly in good condition and one village is even built completely out of adobe brick - strange how just one village can be totally out of synch with neighbouring communities.

Huaihua is a very busy station, but with ony a small proportion carrying people! The rest are endless coal and mineral trains taking their products (seemingly mainly to Shenzhen). This is the junction for three lines and there seems to be constant movement on the tracks.
Oh...and a new line is being built to link through Tongren and north-eastern Guizhou to Chongqing.

The station is at the top end of Hezhou Lu, but you can always just follow the lines....they all meet here!

There are direct trains to Beijing, Changsha and Shenzhen from here (the latter heads north to Zhanjiajie first...go figure!)