Chengdu and into frozen north Sichuan

Wendy and the tour guide!
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Arriving in Chengdu on the airport bus was easy finding the hotel we'd booked was not! We only had the name written down in English not much use to taxi drivers or anyone else. After a bit of a detour we got some help - a swish hotel phoned the number, found the address and wrote it down in Chinese. Turned out not to be that great a hotel although there did seem to be a massage service offered although the girl looked very crestfallen when she saw Wendy in the room as well as a male!

We booked a trip to the Panda Research Base just out of town for the next morning. Fortunately we were there by feeding time so got to see heaps of these extremely cute critters out and about. They have quite large enclosures (with real forest for the adults) so you'd be lucky to see them at any other time. They munched their way contentedly through large amounts of bamboo put in by the keepers and kept looking cute and photogenic.

Pit stops..... the word 'pit' being significant!

Surviving the cold in Juizhaigou!!
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Returning to a new hotel, much more central to everything and walking distance to Starbucks, we decided to do a spot of washing. You'd swear the place looked like a Chinese laundry! The hotel very conveniently supplied a long pole with which to hang up the clothes on a rail attached to the ceiling. With the heating turned up to 31 degrees our clothes were dry in no time.

The 31 degrees is important though - so remember this. As our adventures over the next few days were to test our capacity to withstand cold.

Crystal clear lakes at Juizhaigou
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A trip up north to Juizhaigou national park a frozen wonderland above the snowline. Lucky for us there had just been a fresh dump of snow. Wendy wisely purchased a new 3 layer coat for the princely sum of $80 (it was made in China afterall!) but macho man (aka Keith) decided to tough it out with thermals and his polarfleece vest!

An early start 6.40am was necessary apparently as we then had to spend 90mins touring the town of Chengdu to pick up all the other travelers all of them Chinese. We were mightily impressed to be given badges to wear to mark ourselves out as the PANDA TOUR GROUP!! We were to wear our badges for the next 4 days (indeed we were to wear everything, including all our clothes for the next four days but more of this later!)

Pandas at feeding time in Chengdu
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It was a 12 hour drive north to Juizhaigou, up a river valley. The road was narrow and the traffic was thick, but the scenery just got better and better amazingly rugged mountains, the snow-capped ones we were aiming for in the distance. This area was settled by Tibetans a couple of hundred years ago, which has generated a new tourist industry such as sitting on a yak to get your photo taken. There were several pit stops on the way the word pit being used advisedly. Not so bad for a male, but Wendy was not too pleased by the lack of partitions, doors or any of the other loo niceties we take for granted!

Yaks alive... It's Keith!
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Lunch time was in a restaurant at the halfway point - a huge bowl of rice in the middle of the table with large numbers of side dishes appearing - you just put some rice in your bowl, then launched into the rest with your chopsticks - bones or anything you don't like gets spat out onto the plastic table cloth.

This approach seemed strangely at odds with the fastidious ritual of cleaning the bowls and chopsticks that was undertaken before eating commenced. But when in China, do what the Chinese do. Keith was better at this than Wendy. Wendy has now become vegetarian to avoid the various parts of various animals that could not be readily identified on first inspection. (Keith was seen to spit out something approaching meat as he said it was entrails of something!) It is indeed fortunate that Wendy has started on the cholesterol pills as a steady diet of boiled eggs and cabbage cannot be all that good, in more ways than one! However, Keith thoroughly enjoyed trying out the various spicy Sichuan delicacies.

The hotel at Juizhaigou was COLD. No heating, no hot water and at the snowline! We wore everything we owned to bed that night and still froze! However, we won't dwell on that Wendy will recover with therapy.

Spent the day in the national park. It is indeed a spectacularly beautiful place lakes, streams and waterfalls meandering down valleys, a most picturesque dusting of snow on the trees, towering snow-capped peaks behind. It is a big drawcard for domestic tourists we were certainly not alone for the day! Theres a very neat system of shuttle buses running up and down the valleys picking up and dropping off at each beauty spot, and walking trails as well. Dotted around were some colourful Tibetan villages mainly dedicated to selling colourful Tibetan souvenirs.

Eventually we made it back to the hotel one of the English speaking members of the group told us that for heating we needed to ask the maid after 8 pm, so this we did the poor heating unit made no difference whatsoever, but we did manage to get a thermos of hot water for a sponge down.

After another night in all our clothes, we headed off south again. There were a couple of obligatory stops at retail outlets - jade stuff, yak products. We passed on both, as usual! The main scenic stop of the day was a series of waterfalls whose name eludes me just at the moment, but they were certainly beautiful - deep in a valley, with ice hanging from the trees and rocks. Each fall or pool has a poetic name such as "Two Sleeping Dragons Pool" or some such, with a little legend about it explained on a board - in amazingly flowery English as well as Chinese, which I assume is just as flowery.

We stayed that night in the town of Maoxian, where we were delighted to find the hotel came fully equipped with heating and hot water!!! Oh joy of joys!!

The last day of the trip saw us returning along the same road we'd come up - again, we were amazed by the inhospitable terrain and the ways in which people had hacked small vegetable plots into almost sheer mountainsides. Major roadworks were in progress on the narrow, winding road - this caused very slow progress followed by a complete stop. After an hour or so we were moving again but we'd been delayed so much that after a very late lunch the guide and driver decided to abandon the final scenic spot and head straight back to Chengdu. It was also drizzling rain (or falling fog) so we weren't too unhappy.

Wendy had been promised a Starbucks treat for her stoicism in the face of adversity, but it was just about tea time so we settled for a beer and dinner instead. Keith enjoyed a second massage from the resident masseur at the Traffic Hotel (a proper masseur, not like the one at the first hotel!) and can't recommend her highly enough - half an hour and the shoulders, neck & back had all their yin & yang restored and in perfect harmony!

The Starbucks treat came at lunchtime the following day, which was otherwise spent wandering around some of the backstreets of Chengdu, checking email back at the hotel and finally getting the bus out to the airport for the trip to Lijiang.

A quick note about Chinese accommodation and the family planning strategies! Single beds all the way so far (apart from a double enjoyed at our friend Alan's apartment in Beijing) so we can see why the Chinese are having such success with their one child policy! Unfortunately for Wendy this has drawbacks in more ways than one.... she can't steal Keith's warmth!