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We got a little bit of a slow start on our first day at the park, and taxied our way to the park entrance. Rick remained at the hotel to try and recuperate, but remained a little sick throughout the day.

You start at the bottom of the valley, at about 9500 ft and take a bus to various points up the valley, normally to the top of the park. We headed to Long Lake, at 10500 ft and planned to hike down. Long Lake was beautiful, but very, very crowded, as most of the Chinese there had the same plan. We hiked down from there, which was really just a walk down the designated trail, not really hiking at all. The path was solid with Chinese, and not so scenic, which was disappointing. We got tot the next bus stop and found that almost all of the Chinese hopped on buses and skipped to the next bus stop, a little further down. We continued walking and found the path almost empty. Apparently the key to a little solitude was to not follow the crowd.

The park is made up of many lakes that are terraced along the valley, with wide water falls between each lake, allowing the water to flow down the valley.

  
The water is also full of Calcium Carbonate, and is an insane blue color. This, apparently with the cold water, also prevented the trees that fell into the lakes from rotting, preserving them instead by almost petrifying them.

The preservation of these logs also led to some cool little islands that formed on the exposed ends of logs in the water.

We slowly made our way down the valley, and eventually headed back to the hotel.

That evening, We discovered a little cafe’ run by a young couple who spoke a little bit of English. They also had internet, but for some reason, I could never access my blog. Perhaps I’ve been censored in China… I did try their Yak sandwich, which was absolutely delicious, and added one more animal to my list of animals I’ve eaten. In your face PETA!

Day two at the park we arrived a little earlier and beat most of the crowds to the park. We headed up the park and explored the other side of the valley. Fritz, Rain, Rick, and Brian left early to make it to a bank, leaving Peter, Dave, and I to continue exploring on our own. Luckily for us, we could take our time exploring the “pearl” of Juizhai Gou park, an amazing 1/4 mile wide waterfall. The others who left enjoyed finding the bank unavailable. Score!

We then walked back up to the hotel, which was a lot further than it seemed by cab. It was quite a workout, but an interesting experience.

On Monday, we essentially took the day off. We did a little shopping, a little relaxing, and a little eating. I did manage to get some amazing heartburn after accidentally eating a raw clove of garlic. Oof, that was rough.

The following day we planned to leave extra early. I set the alarm on my cheapo Wal*Mart watch for 4:40, but somehow managed to wake up at 5:14 when we planned to leave at 5:20. Crap! That watch is terrible. We took a van back up to the airport were we picked up a flight to Chongqing (population 7,500,000). In Chongqing Rain and I headed to our flight to Guilin (pop 600,000) while everybody else headed back to Beijing. Fritz was visiting a little on his own, and the remainder of the folks headed home. That’s the problem with jobs, they force you to keep vacations short. Those of use without regular jobs got to enjoy a bit more time in China, which was really nice.

Friday May 25th we left very early to head to the airport in Xi’an to catch our flight to Juizhaigou. Rain made most of these arrangements during our trip, and with the change of plans in our time in central China, it became a little challenging, but with the train to Xi’an we ended up getting a direct flight to Juizhaigou, rather than the two part flight that we had originally planned for, saving us a bit of money, which is never a bad thing.

While standing in line at the airport to check in, Rick ended up throwing up. Apparently he was still sick, which is never a good thing while vacationing. It appeared to be food poisoning, although I’m not sure we ever knew for sure what caused it or why only Rick got sick.

The flight was on Hainan Airlines and was uneventful. The airport in Juizhaigou is on top of a mountain, and is very new and clean. It’s at 3500 meters, about 11,500 ft, which I am quite certain is the highest elevation that I’ve ever been to. Flying within China is a new thing for the most part, so the airport was very new, very nice, and quite empty. There was one other plan there when we arrived. Rain arranged for a van to take us into town, and a hotel.

The van ride into town took about 2 hours, and descended about 2000 feet. There we arrived at our hotel, which turned out to really be more of a resort, with, by far, the most impressive, clean and nice rooms we had seen. We took a look at the shops at the hotel, and rested in our immaculate rooms. Did I mention that I really liked the place? On top of that, the rooms, which normally go for about 980 yuan, were only 350 yuan when Rain was done with the negotiations. Even at 980 Yuan (~$130) the rooms seemed like a good deal, but at $46, wow!

Juizhaigou is in Sichuan, and is an ethnically Tibetan area. Juizhaigou actually means nine (jui) villages (zhai) valley (gou), named for the nine Tibetan villages in the valley. Much of the architecture was tibetan influenced, rather than more traditionally Chinese influenced, and many of the locals were clearly Tibetan. And while central China had lots of cows, here we found Yaks.

After a long few days traveling, we decided to settle in and take it easy for the rest of the day, preparing to head into the park the following morning.

The big Buddha at Longmen. The Buddha here is 56′ tall, and was carved out of the cliff in 675AD, over 1300 years ago.

After than we headed to the White Horse Temple that was nearby. This is a functioning Buddhist Temple that is quite big and impressive. When we arrived there was an incident at the entrance from people who evidentially thought they should get in for free because they were Buddhists, but the monks disagreed. As we slipped in the exit (with out tickets of course) we saw several monks running to the entrance, all one at a time. Fritz commented that apparently the idea in martial arts movies of the fighters showing up one at a time was not far from the truth.

We did a little shopping just outside the Temple afterwards where we found one shop that decided to buck the negotiation trend and just sell things at a set price. Things that others asked 200 for, but would barter down, they sold for 20. Needless to say, we took advantage of this. I picked up a few trinkets that, along with the Mah Jong sets, Fat Boy mailed home to us, and will eventually show up.

From here we took a train to Xi’an (pop. 6,620,000.) Xi’an is the home of the Terracotta Army, but in our mid-trip replanning, we could not figure out how to find time to see it. Next trip, perhaps.

We arrived in Xi’an fairly late for our next morning flight to Juizhaigou. Finding hotels at the last minute proved a little difficult, and we ended up in two separate hotels near the train station, with plans to get up very early to head to the airport, which was a little ways out of town.

The next few days of the trip ended up being a little bit of a blur. In four days we stayed in four different cities. Here’s what we did while in Central China.

From Pingdingshan we visited several farms. First was a family farm belonging to friends of Rain’s that we had met the day before. This farm, a traditional Chinese courtyard house, was no longer a working farm, but was a weekend house for the family, who had long since moved into the city. Of course when we arrived, a huge spread of food was put out for us for lunch. It was a good opportunity to see real Chinese life, at least to some degree. They also had a world map and a map of China where we could put our trip into perspective, and show the locals where we were from.

The people that continued to farm had obtained the land from the non-working farms to build up a larger plot of land. People were given a small plot to farm, about a 1/4 acre I was told, and everybody farmed. The plots are slowly growing as the remaining farmers obtain plots of those who have started farming, but the basic farming was on a vastly different scale from the American idea of farming.

Later we visited two of Rain’s Aunt and Uncles’ farms. At the first one, rain met her nephew (her cousin’s child actually) for the first time, who, like many Chinese children, was cared for by his grandparents. When he arrived, a large group of people, including us westerners, were there, and he initially came into the courtyard, and then ran off crying. He was retrieved and was able to successfully meet Rain. Prior to this meeting, we wandered around the village a little bit, and drew lots of attention from the locals, many of whom had never seen white people before. One local girl was trying to sneak photos of us with her cell phone. Here, in deepest, darkest China, in one of the poorest parts of the country, with people who had never seen whites before, a girl was photographing us with her Motorola Razr. I believe that the Razr is _officially_ no longer cool. Maybe that already happened and I didn’t notice it…

At the final farm, We met with another Aunt and Uncle who had moved back to the farm from the City because Uncle’s health was poor, and their second floor apartment was difficult for him.

That night, we returned to Pingdingshan and headed to a hot pot restaurant. Basically it’s hot oil that you cook your own meat and vegetables in. It was another big meal, although I’m sure it was much cheaper than the duck restaurant in Beijing.

The next day (Wednesday 5/24) we stayed in Pingdingshan for most of the day. We did some shopping. At this point Rick decided that he needed a jacket because he was cold. This seemed odd since it was fairly hot, and Fritz sent him back to the hotel to sleep, since it looked like he was getting sick.

I was a little hungry, and decided to stop at McDonalds, to experience it at least once during the trip. The menu is mostly the same, but just a little different. The biggest difference was that you could substitute a cup of corn for french fries. I went for the egg-beef sandwich, which was basically a hamburger with a fried egg on it. Not too bad for McDonalds fare.

Fritz and I picked up some Mah Jong sets at a local shop. We decided to buy the creme de la creme, and splurged for the 100 Yuan sets. At about $12, it seemed ok to splurge here. We later headed to the Bank to cash traveler’s checks, which took a lot longer than expected. I’ll discuss the money issues in a later email.

We then took a bus to Luoyang planning to see the Longmen Caves (or Grottoes) where there are many carvings of Buddhas along Yi (Yellow) River.

After our train snafu, we found our way on a later train that would only take us as far as Zhengzhou (pop 6,200,000) From there we walked to the bus station to get a bus to Ye’Xian.

Zhengzhou is in central-eastern China, in coal country, and there are very few tourists there. AS we walked to the bus station, we found many people staring at us. There were several times when it was clear that we were the first westerners that some of these people had ever seen. There are very few places left where being white can be so unusual that it creates this much interest. I saw this in Bangladesh as well, but there it was because being white meant you had money. In a city of six million people there are plenty of well-off Chinese, so it was more just the novelty of seeing white people in person.
The bus from Zhengzhou ended up being quite the adventure. First, the bus was mostly full, but certainly not full by Chinese standards. As we slowly made our way out of Zhengzhou we picked up more people, who were waiting along the road waiting for a bus to come along. The interesting part was watching each of these people negotiate with a woman on the bus who was collecting money. We ended up circling one street several times negotiating and picking up more passengers. I guess this was the unofficial bus station. Many people ended up on little stools in the aisle, and the bus was eventually full, even by Chinese standards. The in-bus entertainment was a terrible, presumably American, middle-east terrorism movie from the 80s that had been dubbed into Chinese. Interestingly, movies are all dubbed and subtitled in Chinese, since the written language is common throughout China, but it is spoken very differently in different parts of the country.

The bus trip was mostly uneventful. One of the amazing things was that the roads were all incredibly nice. Most of the highways were really more like wide boulevards, with two or three lanes of traffic in each direction. Of course, occasionally there were four or five vehicles next to each other as lane splitting and passing with opposing traffic present was the norm. There was actually very little traffic between Zhengzhou and Ye’Xian, however, and the highway was mostly empty with an occasional vehicle, normally a combine or tractor.

The most interesting aspect was when we would hit a traffic circle where the highway we were on intersected another highway. You could look down the other highway as far as the smog would let you see and there were few or no vehicles. Is this the Communists planning for the increase in private car ownership in China, or a boondoggle to keep people employed? It’s impossible to say.

We were dropped off just outside of Ye’Xian at a bizarre Sinopec gas station. It had about 20+ pumps, a two story building and a massive structure over the pumps. The amazing thing was that the buildings were mostly abandoned and there was only one vehicle that got fuel while we were there. I used the bathroom here and found what ended up being the nastiest, stinkiest bathroom I experienced in China. Fritz had warned about these, but things have improved tremendously since he lived in China, so most bathrooms were not too bad.

Rain’s brother, whose nick-name is Fatboy because he has a very round head, brought one of the city type bus’ out to pick us up and take us into town. We arrived at the hotel that we had a reservation at only to find that they didn’t have any rooms available, or that they didn’t have any for us. Hotels in China must be specifically approved for foreigners, although many we stayed at, particularly in the less touristy places, were not. Rain, being Chinese negotiated all of the rooms to get the best price without us, and it may have scared the folks at the hotel, but who knows.

Several of Rain’s relatives were waiting for us at the hotel and assisted us in finding another hotel. Unfortunately, some family that was not invited also showed up, and this created a lot of tension. Fritz and Rain decided that we would not be able to stay in Ye’Xian for the three days we had planned, and we decided to head to Pingdingshan (pop. 4,800,000) the next day.

Fatboy and his wife, along with a couple who were friends of Rain’s took us to the one tourist spot in Ye’Xian, an ancient court, where Chinese justice was served, through trial, occasional imprisonment, and often torture and / or execution. We took what is called a mini taxi in Bangladesh to get there, basically a motorcycle power pickup. There were nine of us, and it was a little crowded. Our guide though the court was overwhelmed by us, to be sure. A highlight of the stop was an unexpected concert at the end with traditional Chinese instruments. This was actually pretty cool compared to many cheesy shows of this sort.

A couple of random street scenes. Note the sun in the second shot that yes, that is smog. In your face L.A.!

In the morning we headed to Pingdingshan with Fatboy and his wife.