Thoughts on China

All the pictures for Day 2 are here. This took place on Tuesday, 10/23/2007.Well, after getting a good night’s sleep, a nice hot shower and leisurely getting to the park after 9:00, as opposed to getting there at 7:00 and fighting the crowds just to get entry tickets (for only Y20, you can get an entry pass for your second day, so all you need is the Y90 bus ticket), I was in a much better frame of mind to enjoy the incredible park.

Basically, Jiuzhaigou is about 15 - 20 miles of class 4 and 5 rapids, punctuated with waterfalls that are about 100 yards wide and lakes that are a deep blue, made that way by the naturally occuring calcium in the water. This also preserves trees that fall into the lakes, making them look like surreal entities. Individually, these features make Jiuzhaigou pretty cool, but when they are put together (and the fall colors against the blue lakes are added in), it makes this area really cool!

When I got to the park and took the bus to the first stop (about 12 km or 7 miles into the park), the bus unloaded and went to the boardwalk, which was packed, as you can see…

I thought I was in for another day that was not the most enjoyable, as the crowd moved slowly, or was at a standstill for about 30 minutes. Finally, I got to one of the boardwalks that crossed the river, which was also crowded. But then an amazing thing happened. I had already been to the area further into the park, so I was just going to walk back to the entrance. What I found was that there was almost noone on the other side of the river!!!

So, it was really a great walk in a beautiful park and I ended up being very happy I went back for day 2. I walked about half way with a group of four Chinese ladies, who spoke decent English and we spent the time learning each others languages and taking each others’ pictures. They were going back to Chengdu that afternoon, so they took off to the bus at about 12:30. One of them was from Chengdu, and we all got together, along with her husband, for dinner at one of her favorite restaurants (yes, Allwyn, there are pics of the food!). But that’s another post.

In the meantime, I walked another 2½ hours alone and enjoyed it immensely. I played around with the manual settings on the camera and found that I can get a better picture using them, though it’s not as fast as just setting it to automatic and snapping the picture.

Well, that’s all for this post. I’m behind a few days, so I’ll probably write shorter posts to catch up.