22. Falling Waters And Rotating Wheels of Jiuzhaigou

That second night in Jiuzhaigou (九寨沟) was capped off with a Tibetan song and dance show at the hotel where we stayed - the Sheraton. While the show was colorful and entertaining, the artistry were somewhat less than what we saw in Chengdu...

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None the less, I think this is a nice photo of the colorful costumes on the performers. The locale and other photos can be found at the hotel website:Sheraton Theater


Instead, we were rewarded by the a natural water show when we went up the western gully the next morning. The thousand-meter rise in elevation took us to the mountain top where the primeval forest still remains. Supposedly, all the trees in lower levels were cut down in the late sixties for fuel. That's why the trees are still small in this photo. We only got to see the primeval forest at the peak.

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There are 5 major waterfalls along the gully, Jungle Fall, Panda Fall, Pearl Fall, and the spectacular ShuZheng Fall. (We already saw the Nuorilang Fall yesterday.)Just before the water drops like pearls into the Pearl Waterfall, a walkway has been built over the precipice allowing the feat of walking on water. Pearl Fall is massive but delicate as the majority of the water rushes down at the ends.

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Interestingly, the roaring water emptied into the calmest lake in the whole area - Mirror Sea, i.e., Jing Hai. The lake's water is so clean and sheltered from wind that you won't see any ripples at the surface; instead, what you see is the bottom.

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Finally, our group ended up at a Zhang/Jiang cultural village, the Shuzheng Stockade. Under the color flags are a complete set of Tibetan prayer wheels mounted all around the platform. If you are a Buddhist, you would then walk past each wheel shown here and turn them once. Though I'm not, I did turn the wheels and ended up at this last wheel. I guess that is what life is all about, going around in circles and keeping the wheels turning!

(Note: As my Shuzheng Fall photos were left in a compact flash card that I left in Hong Kong, I'll post them later here.)

21. Nine Villages in Two Gullies - Jiuzhaigou

Whereas Zhangjiajie provided the heavenly joy of seeing the natural beauty of mountains that soar into the clouds, Jiuzhaigou let us earthly folks revel in the natural beauty of water as gravity guides it lower.

The name "Jiu 九(nine) Zhai 寨(village)" says that there are nine villages originally in this area. They are the settlements of the native Chinese minority tribes of Zhang (Tibetan) and Jiang people. The word "gou 沟" literally means a gully, i.e., that part of a mountain valley that has water running through it. Where the water is slowed, large pools of water are formed. Normally, we would call such fresh water bodies lakes. But since the Zhang/Jiang people are so far from seeing a real ocean, they can only dream of seas. So, every lake in the Jiuzhaigou area is named a "Hai = sea". The entire area is a y-shaped gully that starts at an elevation of 1990 meters, rising to the top 'Hai = sea', the Long Sea, at 3150 meters. The park entrance is at the north end, the tail of the 'Y'. Today, we went up the east branch.

As we stayed at the new Sheraton Inn, we can almost walk to the park entrance. Along the path, we can already see a rushing stream of pure and cold water. Our tour group was ushered into the Guest Building and they took a photo of the group. This photo is then printed onto our entrance ticket. Ah! Digital technology is indeed ubiquitous. But as we shall see, this scenic park is right up there in adopting modern measure to keep the park in great shape environmentally.

Because by late October, the peak summer season is already over, large tour buses and personal vehicles are no longer allowed inside the park. Instead, the park only allows a fleet of 25-passenger mini-buses to be ran and they would follow a group and turn off the engine when not needed. The interesting thing is that these are not really 25-passenger buses but what Americans would normally call 9-passenger minivans. Now you figure out how to fit 25 people into a 9-passenger minivan, and I have not even counted the driver and 2 tour guides!

So, what do you see in Juizhaigou? Nothing other than blue skies and even bluer lakes, eh, I mean, seas. As we walked up (or down) beside the gully, the place is dotted with large and small waterfalls. The most spectacular, for the first day, is the Nuorilang Falls (诺日朗瀑布) which is supposedly the widest highland fall in the world. While it is no challenge to Niagara Falls in size, the fact that foot paths have been laid so one can get real close to it made it a wonderful experience.


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There are of course, plenty of websites that document the beauty of Juizaigou, e.g., in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiuzhaigou_Valley (this one explains everything) and, in Chinese: http://www.cpanet.cn/zxyz/yuan-j/index.htm (great professional photos). But the photo posted here is mine, slightly digitally enhanced.






For those whose major activity during a tour is shopping, Jiuzhaigou does not disappoint either.
What I can't understand is that every one of these stalls is selling the same Tibetan handicraft. Now, how do you decide which stall to buy from is a mystery to me. One nice tip though; you can buy a very nice and very real-leather cowboy hat for $15-20 RMB (less than $3 USD) depending on your bargaining skills!





As we rode the environmentally-correct buses up the gully, the air gets thinner, the temperature drops, your ears pop, and the scenery gets even better. When we got to the Long Lake, everyone thought that it looks just as nice as Lake Louise in Banff, Canada. But to me, this is better, this is a place discovered for years and still remained pristine.




But that is only half of the Y branches of Jiuzhaigou.

20. Flying Into Yellow Dragon - Huanglong

After that event-filled day in Chengdu, we were scheduled to fly into JiuZhaigou first thing the next morning. We all woke up at 5am for the bus ride to the Chengdu Shuangliu Airport which is 16km out of town. But once we checked in, we found that our flight has been indefinitely delayed due to the snowy conditions in the JiuZhai-Huanglong Airport.

So we waited in the hot airport. Since I am dying for a cup of java, I tried the airport cafeteria. Incredibly, the only coffee I can order form the greasy dog-eared menu is a RMB $45 (US$6) coffee served in a paper cup! The girl there assured me though that it is indeed freshly-ground coffee they specifically prepared for me. Wow!

But the Sichuan Airline was quite nice. First they provided free breakfast, then later, they shipped everyone to the airport hotel and gave us individual rooms. We were also provided with a free lunch at the airport hotel. Our tour guide made a high-level decision and decided that we should be provided with better food in another 5-star hotel. So we went there but we had to rush back when the airline resumed the flight in the early afternoon.

Now, we are flying into an airport that is about 3500 meters (~11,000 feet)in elevation, comparable to Pike's Peak's 14,000 feet elevation. The view from the air was spectacular, see the photo I took close to our landing.



You have to understand that this so-called airport is really just one single straight pavement laid down in the mountains. The plane landed just like a fighter jet landing onto a carrier. It had to brake immediately and then had to do a 180 degree turn-around at the end of the runway so as to be able to taxi back to the terminal.

All of us were worried; not about the plane but about our ability to survive in such high elevation! Well, first I felt the chill immediately, then I felt a little dizziness because of the low level of oxygen in the air. But this dizziness passed quite quickly once we got into the tour bus. The air, though thin, is squeakly clean and the sky is a luscious blue. How nice.

The airport is known as the JiuZhai-Huanglong because it is situated equally far from both Jiuzhaigou (九寨沟 = Nine villages Gully) and Huanglong (黄龙 = Yellow Dragon). Both are UNESCO world heritage scenic areas in the north-west corner of Sichuan Province.



The bus wound through beautiful mountain roads and we saw, in a distance, spectacular snow-packed peaks basking in the late afternoon sun. Huanglong is famous for its calcite deposits that flowed down in colorful pools:



There is also a colorful waterfall. But really, Huanglong is just the appetizer of what comes next. The bus had to wound through the mountain roads to get to our next destination - JiuZhaigou. It went down roads that are named as 1 to 19 hair-pin turns before we got to sleep in our hotel late at night.