Long ride to the mountains

Above:  Lots of hairpin turns.

We were pleased that we had been able to change our travel to Jiuzhaigou from 0815 to 0900 yesterday when re-ticketing it as a roundtrip. It allowed us to grab a hotel breakfast before hailing a taxi to the Xinnanmen station.

We managed to get a taxi easily. Perhaps it was early, Sunday, or they took pity on us having luggage. There was no problem with the driver not wanting to accept a short journey.

We got to the station around 0815 and tried to change our ticket to an earlier departure but no seats were available. We waited 40 minutes before boarding a big bus, managing to get two front seats facing the windscreen, with the driver seated under us.

We left 10 minutes late. We were on the motorway for 2h before travelling on normal roads. After 5h, we had a lunchstop. It was quite late for lunch and being our first toilet stop, they must expect passengers to have full stomachs and big bladders.

The road got windy further along and there were road works and accidents that held us up a little. On some stretches, there wasn’t enough headroom for the buses to go under the branches and rocks and we often had to pull out to the other side of the road.

My blow-up pillow got decided uncomfortable. It appeared to have grown, then I realised it would be due to the altitude. We felt breathless as well. The hairpin turns kept coming and coming before we rose to a panorama of a beautiful mountain range with a few snowy peaks.

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I had expected no further stops as the first one was time about half-way through the journey. Surprisingly, we had another one 9h after departure outside a farmhouse where they did potato or meat skewers. We peed in their backyard as the single toilet had a long queue.

It was 10h after departure when we passed the large city of Jiuzhaigou and continued another hour (40+km) to Jiuzhaigou National Park area. It was like a low-rise version of Vegas with lots of hotel, shows and restaurants.  We were also shocked by the bus depot where the fleet of green shuttle buses was far larger than you’d see in the depot of an Auckland bus company!

We were relieved to get out of the bus after 11h into the cool night air. We tried organising our return bus but the office was closed and the lights all turned off.

There was a scramble for taxis. We had to accept a ride in a pirate taxi for an inflated price to the Yougen hotel. The hotel would have picked us up if we had a local mobile number but we didn’t.
Like the illegal taxi drivers, the hotel owners were local Tibetan. They were extremely hospitable and anticipated our needs after a long journey very well. They speak Mandarin to each other and even with the older generation. That surprised me a little as many Han Chinese speak their local dialect within their family. It was nice to see Tibetan people having an active livelihood in business unlike in Tibet where there appeared to be an influx of Han Chinese.

We grabbed a simple dinner of dumplings in their restaurant before confining ourselves in our room to get ready for bed.  A lady from one of tour parties knocked on our door and wanted to take photos of our room. Not sure what the situation was, eg. she mistook me for someone else or wanted to have a photo with the European. But I slammed the door in her face after having had enough of rude people for the day.