Jiuzhaigou 12.05-14.05
We took an 8 hour bus from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou although it
would have been a lot faster were it not for the food/toilet stops every 50
minutes! Once we reached Jiuzhaigou as soon as we exited the bus we were
swamped by touts carrying large posters advertising their rooms. A friendly
looking Tibetan woman approached us with quite a good deal on a room so we decided
to take a chance and go for it. This proved to be a good decision as not only
was the room really nice and great value for money, the woman also helped us to
book our onward bus ticket for two days time! The hostel we stayed in was in a
small town called Pengfeng about 20 minutes walk from Jiuzhaigou National Park
entrance. The village had lots of nice Tibetan and Chinese restaurants. As we
hadn’t really had Tibetan food since McLeod Ganj in India we decided to opt for
that. Our dinner was delicious! At one point whilst we were eating a group of
really drunk Chinese men came up to us and insisted we ‘cheers’ them with
alcoholic wines! I think the wine was affecting their memory as we ended up
having to ‘cheers’ them about 5 times!
The day we went to the National Park we were up at 6am as we
were determined to see as much as possible! The park opened at 7 and we were
outside queuing at 6:45am (although obviously this queue completely
disintegrated when the ticket office opened as Chinese people don’t understand
queuing). With a little use of the elbows, we were able to take the first bus
to the top of the park. Jiuzhaigou gets around 1 million tourists a year and so
have created a useful bus system which can take you to all the main scenic
attractions. As we only had one day we decided that we’d take the bus to the
furthest point and then walk as much as possible back down to the entrance. So
our first stop was ‘The Primeval Forest’, at 3000m at 7:45am it was absolutely
freezing! We’d dressed for warm spring weather so only made a very short tour
around the forest as Ed’s nose was starting to go blue! Luckily a little bit
further down the weather was a lot better! The park was absolutely
stunning. We walked through lakes, streams,
waterfalls and mountains. Some lakes were so still and clear they looked like
mirrors and others were so strikingly blue you couldn’t quite believe they were
real! The multitude of Chinese tourists seemed to just take the bus everywhere,
take a picture and then move on, so some areas were quite busy but actually
walking from place to place we basically had the park to ourselves! We ended up
walking about 23km! We were tired but it was just so beautiful we wanted to
keep going! We stayed in the park until nearly closing time and ended up taking
over 400 photos!
The only down side to Jiuzhaigou was that it was rather out
in the sticks so to get to our next destination of Xi’an we had to take an 8
hour bus followed by a 15 hour train ride! As we had been unsure of our travel
timings we had to book the train on the day which meant that we had to sit for
15 hours over night in the ‘hard seat’ section of the train. I can confirm that
‘hard seat’ is an accurate term to describe it. It actually ended up being a
rather amusing train journey. We had a hilarious English/Chinese (we speaking
English, he speaking Chinese) conversation with the man opposite us. We just
about managed to explain we were from England and we were going to Xi’an,
Beijing and Guilin! The group of guys across the way relentlessly gambled
throughout the night and one man was drinking hard spirits at 6 in the morning!
Just before bed (which consisted on sitting on our hard seats and putting our
heads on the table), I wrote my diary which I do daily. At this point everyone
gathered around and simply stared at me! I had no idea why until I noticed that
they were staring at my hand! Nobody in China writes with their left hand!!!!!
Apparently from birth you are told that you must write and use chopsticks with
your right hand! Therefore, they think I’m some sort of freak of nature! The
man opposite even made me try and write with my right hand to check that I
wasn’t lying!
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