Thursday, 8 October 2009

Well, our National Day Trip is over, and we are back in Shanghai.

Our final day in Sichuan was spent at Jiuzhaigou Natural Preserve. As we feared, the iffy weather we'd had the day before at Huang Long was replaced by weather that was a bit warmer, but entirely too moist. But you have to take what comes, right? (Miles suspects I am really converting to Buddhism with all this resignation.)

The drive to Jiuzhaigou was much more pleasant than the one to Huang Long. The road is curvy with switchbacks and hairpins, but it is a good solid road the whole way. There is one part that is called, essentially, "Nine changes of direction," and each of those is numbered with a properly placed sign. You can almost hear the tourists in their cars and buses as the checkmarks are being placed by each. When we got to Jiuzhaigou, the first thing we noticed is that this park is a lot more crowded than Huang Long. Assuming the less than favorable weather deterred anybody, it really would have been mobbed if the weather had been good.

The way Jiuzhaigou works, no one is allowed to tour in the park with their own vehicles. Everyone instead uses a set of shuttle buses that the park provides. Eminently sensible. The park's road system basically has the shape of a letter Y. You begin at the bottom of the Y where the entrance is. You are meant to ride to the meeting point of the branches of that Y, where the visitor center and the buffet restaurant are located, change buses, proceed up one or the other fork (all the way to the end), and then start working your way back to the meeting point, then do the same with the other fork, and then work your way back out to the entrace at the bottom of the Y. There are stops along the way on all of the branches, but the buses only make stops in one direction (the one that goes back to the meeting point, or back to the entrance).

Jiuzhaigou means "Nine Tibetan Villages" and at some point there were really nine villages inside what is now the park. We were going to tour one of these, but got too pooped out and gave it a miss. Some guide books say there has been a sort of Disneyification of the villages. We don't know if that's true or not.

The scenery of Jiuzhaigou must really be breathtaking when seen in good weather. As it was, we were impressed with what we saw in the rain we had. I apologize that there are so few pictures. In part it was difficult to take pictures in the rain; and in part it was difficult to take pictures with such a throng of visitors also trying to do so. Some of what you see here is similar to the travertine structures seen at Huang Long. But there is much more here that you can't see there. To begin with, the distances are much more vast, so that, unlike Huang Long where you can cover everything in 5 or 6 hours on foot, you really must use the buses to get across large distances, and only walk between bus stops as your energy and time limits permit. Some of the things you see here (in any weather) are bits of virgin timber (called "primeval forest") and large waterfalls. In better weather, the surrounding mountains are very scenic (but mists mostly shrouded them for us).

The pictures I was able to take of Jiuahzigou (day 7) are here.

So our day at Jiuzhaigou was yesterday. Today, we spent the whole day (uneventfully, if rather slowly) making our way back to Shanghai. There is a quite nice airport located midway between Huang Long and Jiuzhaigou parks, called, naturally, the Jiu Huang airport. We flew from there to Chengdu, a real Sichuan city (and the provincial capital). After a long layover, and a transfer from China Eastern to Sichuan Airlines (which involved collecting and moving our baggage ourselves — inter-airline luggage transfer wasn't offered to us when we checked in at Jiu Huang, and we might not have trusted it if it had been) we took off for Shanghai. All told, it took 9 hours to get back to Shanghai, about three hours of it in the air, a little over one hour of it in cars, and most of the rest just waiting about for the next stage to occur.

It is bliss on earth to be back in our Shanghai apartment. Where we have heat we don't even need to turn on but could if we wanted to. Where we have hot water any hour of the day we take a notion to use it. Where we are very much in the 21^st century, creature-comforts-wise.

Don't think I was entirely idle on this travel day. No, indeed. I took a set of shots of the Minjiang Hotel as we left it. (It was an afterthought. So there wasn't much planning or any careful composition, sorry for that.) One thing I did not have time to snap (and I regret that omission almost bitterly) was the hotel's revolving door at the grand entrance. The evidently Han Chinese architect had worked into his plan for the axis of the revolving door, a Tibetan style prayer wheel in the right sort of brass, but with all the wrong sort of markings on it. This reminded me somehow of something Miles and I saw many years ago in Japan, while traveling there at Christmas time — a Santa on a crucifix. Anyhow, you can see the pix I did snap of the Minjiang (day 8) here.

It's hard to sum up our National Day trip. We really saw a lot, much of beautiful, all of it fascinating. We also worked awfully hard to do it. I think that probably sums up what travel in the interior provinces of China is like — difficult, beautiful, fascinating.