Day 2

We gave breakfast a miss this morning, as we looked in the dining room and everybody was eating rice and noodles. We just couldn't face it, so just got on the coach and had our cakes and snacks for breakfast. As we stayed near Huangalong Park last night, we have a couple of hours to drive to Jiuzhaigou National Park. We were all pretty tired still, so we had a nap before getting to the park. We woke up because the guide was speaking through his microphone, of course in Chinese. He was holding up a flag and we have to follow him when we arrive at the park. This was the first point of realisation that we'd booked our trip with a Chinese tour group , although once we have our tickets, we're free to do as we please.

We left the coach and made a note of the registration number and where we parked, as we wouldn't want to be left behind or get lost. We followed the guide and his flag, who went through to the main gates to purchase our entrance tickets. Once you've paid the entrance fees, the price includes the bus around the national park. Unfortunately you need to take the bus around, as the distances to cover are huge and you cannot walk around the whole place. We were given a map of the park, in Chinese, which wasn't very useful. Once we'd been given our tickets, David, Claire, John and myself all went off together to explore the park.

So having read a blog online giving advice and on the instruction of one of the English speaking girls on the bus, we decided it was best to catch the bus to the top of the valley heading to Primeval forest first. This stop is the furthest one away, and is around 30km from the main entrance. It made more sense to start at the top, and work our way down the valley to stop off at the main attractions. On the bus, David started to use his Chinese translation app to see if we could work out the name of the attractions in the park. He translated a few, enough to keep us going for a while.

Primeval forest

On the bus journey, we passed gorgeous craggy mountains, lush green valleys, turquoise blue lakes and could see some snow capped peaks in the distance. We are lucky with the weather today, it's blue skies and the sun is shining. It's a perfect day for hiking in this beautiful valley. The bus drove up through the mountains, snaking round the constant curves, driving with haste. The bus was packed, as you'd expect it to be. It took us an hour to reach the Primeval Forest. We had travelled to an altitude of nearly 3,000 metres above sea level. Once we arrived, loads of people hopped off the bus.

When we arrived, there was an English sign to tell us the name, so we won't need to translate all the names on the map, luckily. We followed the crowds and went for a walk into the forest, via the board walk plank. I felt that having this board walk destroys the natural surroundings of the forest, and it wasn't very peaceful as there were so many people. We tried to walk one of the trail loops through the forest, but the path was closed, so we just did a 5 minute trail and turned around. There were lots of old fir and spruce trees, arrow bamboo and mountain ash. There was sweet smelling honeysuckle in the air. We could have caught the bus to the next site, but decided to walk the path, which goes down through the Jiuzhaigou valley. This is when you really get to see the natural beauty surrounding this whole area. Just a vastness of mountains, forests and greenery in the background. I instantly fell in love with this place as soon as we stepped off the bus and there weren't as many crowds of people walking the trails.

Swan lake and arrow bamboo lakes

We continued walking for a couple of kilometres, just stopping to admire the scenery along the way and to take pictures. We ended up at the next site; swan lake, which is so named because because swans make a quick stop during their journey. It's a swamp on a hillside, whereby, due to silt deposit, it's covered in grasses. In the middle of the lake, it is deep and green. It was a nice lake, but we've seen so many in our time, that we didn't get moved by it really. We couldn't carry on walking the trail downhill as part of the path was closed again, so we hopped on the bus to the next point of interest, arrow bamboo lake. This lake was more turquoise green in colour. It was just another big lake, so we continued walking along the board walk. We saw many small fish in this lake all around the edges of the water, although no big fish.

Arrow bamboo falls

I hadn't really had much time to do research about the main attractions in the park, so we were basically going into it blind, only really having seen a few photos of places in the park online. We saw a sign for arrow bamboo falls after walking past the lake. I love waterfalls, they hold a special place in my heart, especially the mighty Iguazu Falls, so looked forward to seeing it. We could hear the water gushing through around us and just followed it through to the source and came across a waterfall. It was the arrow bamboo waterfall. It was pretty, so we stopped to take a few pictures while there wasn't too much of a crowd, although it did start to get a bit busier, so we continued on walking.

We'd probably been walking for around 2-3 hours now, so we were getting hungry, so we decided to carry on walking to find a spot for lunch. We thought there would be loads of places with picnic benches to have a bite to eat, but no, it was just board walk. There are rest huts along the way, but we didn't fancy eating in there. After walking for miles, we found a place by a dried up little river, it must have dried up now it's the summer season. There was somewhere for us all to sit away from the main path, so we all sat, rested and ate our lunch.

Panda lake and falls

After lunch, we carried on, and guess what we found; picnic benches and a lunch area, oh well where we sat wasn't too busy anyhow. So we kept on walking until we came to our next main attraction; panda lake. It's so called because there are actually pandas around the lake, however we of course did not see any here. The main spectacle at panda lake are a group of carp like fish that gather and play in the lake. This lake is one of two lakes that gets frozen in the winter months, as we're here in summer, we just saw it full of water. We also saw another waterfall, panda falls. This was fairly crowded, but was a lovely waterfall all the same. It got very noisy around here, so we didn't stop for too long.

Colourful lake

I'd heard of the colourful lake from a friend we met travelling back in Laos. Someone said to her that the colourful lake is one of the prettiest lakes around, so I really wanted to see it. We had been walking past a huge green lake with lots of dead, rotting trees, overgrown with green algae. I hadn't realised at first that this was the colourful lake, but we did see a lot of people at the other side of the lake on a path, so just followed it around. It was really busy around the other side of the lake; this was when we realised that it was the colourful lake. We stopped to admire it for a few minutes and I went off to take a closer look at what was growing underwater. As I approached the edge of the lake, I saw a woman posing for pictures in her wedding dress. There was a photographer there, along with her husband, so they must have got married. Everyone was surrounding them, so it must have been difficult for the photographer getting pictures of them alone. I left them to it and wandered around the lake. There were more colourful things in the lake, although I do not have a clue as to what those are. The lake wasn't as multicoloured as I would've expected, but perhaps it's more colourful at certain times of the year.

Becoming famous for 5 minutes

We carried on negotiating our way through the crowds. It's constantly busy everywhere you turn and it gets quite uncomfortable trying to overtake people. We always noticed that the locals always seemed to take an interest in us passing them by and would just stare at us. Others really enjoyed seeing westerners and wanted to stop to pose for photos with us. So we kept stopping to let the locals have their pictures taken with us. I found it quite sweet really as the girls were particularly interested in Claire and I. Although some of the girls took a liking to John as they wanted to pose for a photo with him. I had to capture the moment!

Rainfall of pearl beach

Once we'd had our pictures taken, we went up look at the rainfall of pearl beach. Dave had heard about this place, so we went towards it and were surrounded by gorgeous green forests, fast flowing water and mountain scenery. It was heavenly, but it was very crowded and noisy, so it spoiled it a little. It got it's name from the sparkling effect of droplets, which resemble pearls as it cascades down towards the falls. The flow of water was going downstream, it was loud and powerful, so we continued to follow it down some steps until we reached pearl shoal waterfall.

Pearl shoal falls

When we reached the waterfall, I was blown away by it. It was not quite as spectacular as Iguazu falls, but I would say that it comes a close second to the mighty Iguazu falls. It's definitely the most magnificent thing here in Jiuzhaigou. I was in awe so much that as we were walking down the steps to see the waterfall, I nearly fell down as I was too busy looking at the falls and not where I was going! We stopped for a few pictures on the way to the bottom and I just wanted to stare at it.

As we reached the bottom, surprisingly, it wasn't too crowded around the area. We took as many pictures as my camera would allow before there were hoards of people around us. Shortly after, it got really busy. We had more local people around us wanting to take photos with us, so we posed with them by the waterfall. The girls put a hat on Claire, then gave us one each to wear, then got us all to pose for a picture together. They even let Claire keep her hat, which was sweet of them. We'd met the same girls before we came down the steps, only this time there were more of them!

Nuorilang waterfall

Time was getting on, so we had to make the decision to skip the left hand fork in the national park. We just wouldn't have had time to get the bus up there, do our sightseeing and then come back in time for the bus. So we took the bus back to the stops nearer the entrance. I'm so glad we did this, or we would have missed another beautiful waterfall; Nuorilang falls. It was nearly as impressive as the pearl shoal falls, but not quite. This waterfall is one of the symbols of Jiuzhaigou. The waterfalls are beautiful to look at all the same. Most of these lakes and waterfalls have really wowed us and I just couldn't believe how many beautiful natural wonders there were in one place.

After the waterfalls, we passed a few more lakes; rhinoceros and tiger lakes, which have folkloric names and also sleeping dragon lake; so named due to it's shape resembling a dragon. They were not as spectacular as the other things we'd already seen, so we continued making our way down towards the exit. At our last bus stop, we saw a Tibetan village, they have many coloured flags which represent various prayer scriptures. We had been told to avoid the Tibetan villages as the locals can be pushy, forcing you to buy things, so we just waited for our bus to take us to the exit. We've all thoroughly enjoyed our time in this national park. It's definitely one of China's treasures. We are all shattered, so hopefully we'll get a decent dinner and a good nights sleep.

Day 3

The next morning was another noodle and rice breakfast, so we skipped it in favour of our own snacks. We had to leave at 6am, so it was another early start. We started driving and left Jiuzhaigou, I was sad to say goodbye, but also relieved to be going back to Chengdu to be catching up on sleep and having a lay in. Not long after we left, we stopped so the driver could re-fuel, then carried on driving for an hour or so. We carried on driving until we reached a Tibetan village.

Tibetan village

We all got off the coach and walked up to a Tibetan village. Amazingly, this part of China used to belong to Tibet, until the Chinese government declared it part of mainland China. When we arrived here, I did feel like I was not in China but more like Tibet. The people faces look different, and of course they dress differently. We were greeted by a local woman who was given a flag for our group to follow. She took us up to a traditional Tibetan house. She spoke in Chinese, so I have no clue as to what she was saying.

We got taken into the house and she was telling our group about their house and culture. I only wish we could understand what she said. When we went inside, I could not believe how intricately painted the interior decor was. Everything was painted in bright colours, patterns, animals, dragons, symbols which had some meaning to them I guess. I noticed the animals painted on the walls, symbolising the Chinese calendar like the rat, tiger, and dragon to name a few. It must take months on end just to decorate one house. I think it's a communal house and that a lot of people live here, as while in their kitchen/ dining room, there were many plates, bowls and cooking pots and pans. The girl also showed demonstrations of how they use a bracelet as a method of relieving tensions when you use a computer all day.

Afterwards, we got to go outside into a food tent, so we tasted some items and left. Along the rest of the journey we stopped at a few more useless places including for Chinese medicines, how to make a comb and another supermarket type place. The only good thing about that one was free food and drink tasting, so everyone was in their element tasting cured meats, not me, I didn't like the look of any of it! I was happy to have found something like a tracker bar! Once everyone was full up, we left and went back to the horrible restaurant we'd eaten in on the first day. This time hardly anybody ate lunch, including us. We continued driving for quite a few hours until we arrived back in Chengdu about 7pm.