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Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve and Songpan
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A twelve hour bus ride north of Chengdu got us to Jiuzhaigou, home to a spectacular nature and scenic reserve. The drive itself was very pretty as we zipped along rivers and wound our way up and down mountains. Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve is made up of narrow valleys with high mountains rising up on either side. Water gushes from the mountains and pours out all over the valleys in rivers, streams and waterfalls. The landscape is very unique; limestone and calcium deposits help make for intense and colourful lakes. It is a very touristy park though. Approximately 1.5 million visitors pass through it each year. Even though it was late November and off-season, there were still tons of Chinese tour groups happily snapping away pictures and moving from highlight to highlight. There are roads that travel alongside the rivers, on which buses cart visitors up and down, from scenic point to scenic point. Boardwalks also follow the rivers, passing by the lakes a little inside the forests, but unfortunately for us, almost all of these were closed. The signs say this is due to "fire protection season", but we just think they are trying to save money on maintenance.
We had to settle for utilizing the bus and walking on the roads. The bus is quite expensive, 80 yuan (about $10) and when we discovered on our first day in the park that they never check for tickets, we opted not to buy one on the second day. We spent a full two days busing, walking and ogling all over the reserve. The colours of the lakes are so fantastic; any pictures we took do not do them any justice. It is almost like the Rockies, but condensed into a much smaller area. It was great to be out in nature again, to see a crisp blue sky and blinding sunshine. We hadn't seen that since the Great Wall; all of our destinations have been cities and with the pollution you never do get a clear look at the sky.
After our second day at Jiuzhaigou, we took a bus back towards Chengdu and stopped in a small town called Songpan for a day and a night. We were the only Western tourists in town that we saw that day. We just wandered around the few streets, climbed on their wall, shopped around, and sat in a tea house. At night we did run into a few other tourists who had just come in, and so had dinner with them and shared a nice conversation. It was one of the most pleasurable towns in China we'd been to and we had a very relaxing time there. Early the next morning (6:30 am to be exact) we were on a bus back to Chengdu.
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| 43. | Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve and Songpan - Songpan, China Nov 26, 2007 (  38 ) |
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