status of my groin

… unpunched.

For those of you that didn’t read the last entry (and I’m deeply hurt by that by the way), Penny mentioned that after our less than convenient 28 hour train/bus combo to get here, I vowed that if this place sucked, I would punch myself in the groin.

Well it doesn’t suck… it’s actually pretty cool, and I suspect it’s one of the most under-appreciated (by foreigners) places you could visit while in china.

(Also as an aside, we’ve decided to fill this post with images, because they can show things better than we can describe them, so brace yourself for a deluge of photos… after a deluge of words, which you can skip by scrolling down)

So the actual town is called Juizhaigou, and it serves as the base for a couple of Unesco World Heritage parks that are open all year round, but tend to get all iced up and frozen in winter (which is now). So the good news is, the tickets are more than half price… the bad news is, it’s cold and frozen… which isn’t actually bad news, because I love the snow, and if she wants to marry me, Penny will learn to love it too (…shakes fist).

Anyway, the town is mostly closed… all the shops are boarded up and we can’t see in them, but we’ve developed a fun guessing game where we pick a sign and try to guess what the shop sells… here are some of our favourites:

• Fatty Intestine Powder… (pretty self explanatory I think)
• Bean Curd Pudding Fish… (obviously a strangly named local fish restaurant, which we’re going to dinner at once we finish the blog).
• Affordable Restaurant… (not to be confused with Cheap Restaurant, which is just up the road)
• Chicken Wang… (I have no idea about that one).

The other interesting thing is that all of the classy hotels (and there are a lot of them), are completely empty and boarded up… the Sheraton is the only one that’s even open, which is why we sent the last post from there.

We actually didn’t know the Chinese name or location of our hostel (we’re living on the edge, man!) so we had to use the internet to get the english address, then get the desk staff at the hotel to translate it to Chinese and ring us a cab.

(Penny here…We did attempt to get a cab from the bus station, but when I mentioned that I only had the name of the hostel in English, the cabbies laughed hysterically. They were still shaking their heads and muttering “English” when we finally decided how we were going to avoid sleeping on the side of the road, and walked to the Sheraton. Not that they should be expected to read/speak English, but we’re starting to realise that we slightly overestimated the amount of English that people here would understand. It’s very rare that anyone speaks any English whatsoever…even in tourist jobs.)

Eventually we got to the hostel, which is nice enough… except for the fact that the hot water heater is way too small so there’s no way to shower from about 7PM onwards… and if you shower early, the cold water pipes are frozen, so the water is scalding hot and there’s no way to adjust the temperature… also there’s barely any heating. (Penny here: therefore I am having to strongly encourage Josh to maintain his personal hygiene)

But the girl on the desk speaks pretty good english and the room doesn’t smell like a sewer, so there’s always that.

Anyway I’m aware I’ve typed 475 words worth of mood lighting so on to the actual good stuff.

There are two areas we wanted to visit, Huanglong & Jiuzhai Valley. Unfortunately, before we flew out of Australia, we discovered that Huanglong is closed this winter… fortunately, when we got here, we discovered they opened it, just for us.

But there are no buses to Hunglong so we had to charter a taxi. It cost 500 RMB but we split it with a couple of German backpackers so it was a little cheaper. It took 3 hours to get there and the road was all iced up, but luckily our cabbie was a very responsible fellow and he took the turns really slowly and got us there nice and safe.

Quick primer… Huanglong is at a much higher altitude than Juizhai Valley so all of its lakes and waterfalls are completely frozen… the pictures don’t really do it justice, but hopefully you’ll get the rough idea, so enough blabber… here’s Huanglong:

  

  

  

Our cabbie wanted to make sure we left the park before dark to make sure we weren’t on the icy, dangerous road at night, so we took 3.5 hours to walk the whole place. There were quite a fair few smaller side trails that were closed due to excessive ice, but we probably wouldn’t have had time for them anyway. We got back into the cab and I decided to take a nap, confident we’d be safe in the hands of our awesomely safety conscious cab driver.

I woke and thought we might be on the run from the cops. Our cabbie was all over the place. Swerving into on coming traffic, taking corners at crazy speeds. Basically, the ice had melted and the road was clear, so he threw out his safety hat and went for broke… it was ok though because he didn’t ask for a tip at the end.

So day 2, we went up to Jiuzhai Valley, which is where we decided I didn’t have to punch myself.

Usually, you take the bus up to the top of the park, and walk about 10km down through all the scenic spots, but unfortunately, the trails were all closed (because it’s fire season and apparently the Chinese can’t be trusted not to spark up a ciggie) so we had to use the bus and go from spot to spot… it didn’t matter… it was still incredibly beautiful.

Again, I’ll let the pictures speak for us:

 

 

 

 

Of particular note was this one place… Arrowhead Bamboo waterfall. There was no bus stop there and we wanted to get off and look at it, but they wouldn’t stop for us… Eventually we got a bus to stop there, but they told us we only had 20 mins… which we thought was fine, but 10 mins into our walk, the bus driver appeared and hurried us back to the bus. We then spent an hour trying to get back to the waterfall, and being thwarted by every bus driver we tried. Eventually we convinced an english speaking tour guide to let us off of the last bus for the day, and assured him we’d walk back when we were done. They sent a car up for us.

Anyway here it is… we went through a lot, but it was worth it:

 

 

 

And here’s two last photos we took…

 …anyway we’re out of internet time so that’s it for now. We have one more day in the park, but then we’re bussing back to Chengdu… next stop, Panda sanctuary.