Myself, Aaron and Susan caught the train to Guangyuan with the intention of going to Jiuzhaiguo the following the day. Like me, they chose their route because they didn’t want to back track the same route from Chengdu even though that route is more convenient. They had booked their transport via the hostel. I didn’t want to pay the hostel a commission fee when I was passing the train station anyway when coming back from the terracotta warriors. The seats were all booked by the time I got to the ticket office so ended up paying more money for a sleeper than if I had just paid the commission. Never mind.
I tried to sort out my camera situation before leaving but didn’t get time. Once I arrived at the station I didn’t have time to call in by the police station and drop off a box of chocolates to thank the ones who did find the time to help me. I spent the majority of the train journey in the aisles between the carriages because you can move from side to side depending on what side has the most interesting view and you can smoke. I spent a lot of the time chatting to a man who was both deaf and dumb using the dictionary at the back of my phrasebook. The arrangement of words in alphabetical order means nothing to him but he flicked through the dictionary for half an hour and must have picked up on Chinese characters that he thought would come in handy later and memorised their location to speed things up. He was very quick at finding the words he wanted and unlike the majority of Chinese people I met, managed to read between the lines when I was trying to explain things that required words that weren’t in the dictionary. I was surprised by the amount of things that were communicated. I still would have preferred to have stared out the window all day. Never mind.
He insisted on giving me my 2nd free meal in 3 days. The Chinese are a strange bunch of creatures. When they aren’t trying their utmost to rip off foreigners they are insisting on giving outsiders freebies. It’s one of the many shield/spear situations in this country. The staff in the restaurant carriage continued to talk to the man even though he clearly used hand gestures to tell them he was deaf and dumb before he proceeded to make his order using his finger. I’m totally confused about the reasons so many people here find it so difficult to employ lateral thinking. They got his order wrong. He had been pointing at a Chinese character and pulling a facial expression of disgust and seemed annoyed that he had to spend quite a lot of time fishing out the chillies and bits of meat that he didn’t want. He went to bed shortly after sunset and I read my Genghis Khan book for the remainder of the journey. He must have a frustrating life (the deaf man, not Genghis Khan). I’ve been invited to his house when I’m in Chengdu (likewise… the deaf man, not Genghis Khan). I turned down invitations to stay over with people in Hangzhou and Guangzhou because I thought the people were boring (and very gay) but I might take up on the deaf man’s offer.
The three scots left Guangyuan Train Station and got into one of the cheap, dirty hotels that are always clustered near bus stations. The rule against foreigners must not apply to areas where foreigners rarely venture. Aaron had been sick all day, was sick once we got to the hotel and also when we got up at 5:15am to catch the only bus of the day. Aaron decided to get on the bus despite the advice of Susan and myself to take a chill day. “If the guy from Touching the Void was in my situation, he’d get on the bus”! Classic line, I’d use it myself someday if I was the sort of person who’d get on that bus having been vomiting for 24 hours.
Immediately after leaving Guangyuan the bus entered the edge of the Tibetan Plateau and veered across mountain roads with deep lakes below before coming into Gansu province, following a fast flowing river all the way up to Jiuzhaiguo. Tibetan housing was evident much of the way. The houses are smaller than the normal rural countryside houses and have less elaborate carvings around the doors, windows and roofs but have elaborate paintings on the faces of a lot of walls. The toilets that the bus would stop at every couple of hours were up there with the worst I’ve seen. They were all joined onto the pig sheds. At least the other communal squats I’ve seen have had doors leading into the toilets so that the whole world can’t look in. I’ve seen one other pig shed/toilet in someone’s house in Guangkeng but at least that wasn’t communal. These aren’t places to be if you’ve been ill…
Although there is little to differentiate Chinese cities I’ve noticed a number of regional differences in agricultural techniques. In Jiangxi they like to separate the rice husks from the straw immediately after it’s been cut and put the straw in big circular piles and dry the husks on the roofs of their houses and on the sides of the road. In Guizhou they’ve constructed large wooden structures where they hang both the husks and the straw out to dry. In Southern Gansu they tie their straw in big bundles and then hang them onto the trunks of trees. I’m not sure if there are differences in climate or terrain which makes one technique unsuitable for certain regions or if they are just approaching the same problems with different but equally effective solutions.
Once we arrived in Jiuzhaigou I waved goodbye to Aaron and Susan who had booked a place 12km from Jiuzhaigou. The decision about whether to camp or get a cheap place to stay took all of 10 seconds. If I had a warm sleeping bag and there was a bit of flat ground it maybe would have took me 20. I got a dorm with a kettle, a warm shower, and an electric blanket! I hadn’t had one of those in years. I got all tucked in, read the last chapter of my Genghis Khan book then started reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s the first novel I’ve read since leaving school. The bookshop had a serious lack of non-fiction books available and the novels consisted largely of Jane Austin. I’ve read a couple of interesting Mark Twain quotes on cryptograms.org and bought his book over A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens solely based on those quotes. I’d definitely recommend my first novel in over a decade. I was laughing out loud on several occasions. I’ve decided I’m going to write my own book. I don’t know what it will be about yet but judging by my writing skills, I’m assuming that every 2nd or 3rd paragraph will end with the words ‘never mind’. Never mind, at least it will be good fun writing it. I think it will have a similar theme to the poems in ‘Knots’ by R.D Laing. I got recommended that book when I was about 16 by a teacher who obviously thought that I was obsessed with over-analysing the more complex rhythms in life.
The National Park at Jiuzhaigou is hard to believe until you see it. The mountains surrounding the valley are up to 4600m high. It’s mid-November and they are all snow-capped. I was hoping to get to Yunnan via Western Sichuan across the Tibetan Plateau where the average height is in the late 3000’s. I imagine the roads there would be terrible even without snow. On top of that, all Chinese bus drivers seem reckless and I reckon the ones in western Sichuan would be devout Tibetan Buddhists who don’t really care if the bus falls off a Himalayan cliff face. I don’t believe in all that reincarnation but even if I did, I’d still want to go to Yunnan and Laos before heading off for a cup of Yak butter tea in the land of nirvana. I’ll ask for advice on what to do once I’m in Chengdu. If it’s not advisable to go to Western Sichuan I’ll take the boring road to Yunnan and probably leave China before my visa has expired. I heard from a fellow traveller that visas in nirvana are renewable at no extra cost.
Anyway, The Mountains in Jiuzhaigou deposit large volumes of calcium carbonate into the water which results in the azure hues that give off astounding reflections. I think the calcium also prevents the trees that have fallen into the water from rotting. There are huge trees which have taken the place of the ones that are still perfectly preserved in the lake below. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them will have been lying in the lakes for 20 years or more. Anyone who needs to Photoshop their pictures must be absolutely useless with a camera. You can just point and snap and you’ve got a masterpiece.
Mountains may be holy places but beauty is far from free. The park is not cheap. Over a million people visit it a year. I was the first person to buy a ticket when it opened at 7am and first into the park where I got the bus to the top of the valley. Only 365 people a year can claim this accolade. I’ll be putting that in my C.V. I walked the whole way down (22 miles I think) and my right knee was in bits by the time I got to the bottom. Apart from China, the countries I most want to visit in Asia are Nepal and Iran. It will be a waste of time going to Nepal if I can’t do more than a day’s walking at a time before being reduced to a cripple. With me going on about a sore leg and what I’m probably not going to be doing in the future you would be justified in assuming I walked through the valley feeling sorry myself. On several occasions I thought about what might have happened if I had followed the medical advice they gave sciatica sufferers 10 years ago and still have been lying in my bed 23 hours a day or if I had made a handful of different decisions over the years and ended up living a comfortable but rather mundane life in Scotland and felt extremely lucky to be there. I feel jacking it all in is the best decision I’ve ever made and felt truly blessed to be one of the lucky people who get to visit such a place. The delusive feeling of absolute freedom is phenomenal.
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