I love places of natural beauty, and 九寨沟 (Jiuzhaigou) is one of the most amazing places that I have visited in China (get used to hearing that because my next few adventures were all incredible.
On Tuesday morning, Jaye and I woke up early so that we could go have our free breakfast before heading to the tourist attraction. The restaurant was much less crowded than it had been the evening before, but we still enjoyed a typical Chinese hotel breakfast with some baozi (包子, steamed buns), corn, sweet potatoes, green vegetables, noodles, and hard-boiled eggs. As we ate, we watched the traffic outside our window. Even before 8 a.m., it was crowded with cars, and we knew that getting into the park was going to be crazy.
After breakfast, we stood by the side of the road, waiting for the hotel to come pick us up. Thankfully, they provided transportation to the entrance of the park (Jaye found a wonderful hotel for us!). The road was crowded, but it was faster than I expected to get to the entrance of the park. As we left the car and walked toward the entrance, we joined a throng of other tourists with the same goal in mind. I started to see the magnitude of the number of people entering the park with us. The closer we got to the entrance, the more we found ourself in the middle of a giant crowd. Jaye had bought our tickets online weeks before, and it’s a good thing she did because by this point, they were completely sold out.
But as we stood there surrounded by hundreds of other people, an amazing thing happened. The security guards guided us into lines, and everyone stayed in their lines. There was no pushing or shoving; everyone waited calmly in our various lines that snaked away from the entrance. I was very impressed.
The lines also moved very quickly. We could see that on the other side of the entrance, buses pulled up, loaded up with people, and then moved quickly away. This park was really incredibly well-organized.
After just a few minutes in line, we were into the park and on the bus. We got seats, and Jaye and I sat near the front, close to a tour guide. As we drove into the park, we could look out the windows and see the beautiful blue lakes. I was amazed at the beauty.
“But look, there’s a path out there, can’t we get out here?” I asked Jaye.
“I guess not,” she replied. “It looks like the buses don’t stop at these places now.”
“But wow, those places are incredible!” I murmured in awe.
“Yeah, and these aren’t even the most beautiful lakes!” Jaye said.
As we got closer to the first unloading point, I noticed that a couple people were walking back down the road, next to those lakes in the direction that we were coming from.
“Look, we can walk back!” I told Jaye.
She turned to the tour guide. “How do you recommend that we see the park?”
“Don’t walk back, just walk forward. They’re so much prettier.”
We reached the unloading point, and Jaye and I got off with our crowd of people to join an even bigger crowd up people who were at the bus stop and heading up the mountain and further into the park.
“Maybe we should go back just a bit.” Jaye suggested.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking also. I think I would enjoy looking at the places without tons of people even if it’s not as beautiful. Then we can go ahead and look at the famous places later.”
So we headed back, away from the crowds and into the peace and quiet of the natural beauty of Jiuzhaigou. That was our best decision of the day.
Jaye and I walked along that beautiful stretch of road, enjoying the serene beauty of those clear waters with the mountains in the background. We saw a couple of other people, but sometimes we were completely alone on the path. My heart was filled to bursting with the beauty and the peacefulness around us. Jaye checked the map and we saw that there was a bridge to the other side of the lakes further ahead. We decided to walk in a circle around the lakes and then back to the place were we had gotten off the bus. We passed incredible waterfalls, and we looked into the clear blue water to see trees that had died and were now a part of the lake. One sign showed us a picture of one lake that had been destroyed in an earthquake. But the heartbreaking view in the picture, although obviously the same area, held little in common with the serene beauty in front of us. I’m thankful that the people who run the park were able to return the lake to such beauty.
We crossed the bridge/path that went through the lakes to the far side of the lakes. This area was even more beautiful. Now we were out of the sun which was nice since it was starting to get warm. We were also away from the road and the streams of buses that kept bringing tourists up the mountain. We were surrounded by trees that opened onto the lakes. The lakes were divided by little waterfalls or rows of trees. We walked from one to the next, enjoying the different beauty that each one gave. We started to meet more people on this side of the lakes as they trickled down from the upper area, but there still weren’t very many.
Finally, we got back to the other side of the lake from the bus stop. Now there were a lot of people, and we could see even more people on the other side of the lake next to that bus stop. But we also looked ahead and saw that our trail on this side of the lakes continued, and there were fewer people than the mobs on the other side. So we decided to stay over here. We were now at the Rhino lake, and this was an incredible place. The water was deep and blue and magnificent. The further we walked, the fewer people there were also. Some people sat on the steps or the edges of the path and ate self-cooking rice. That would have been a good thing to bring, I thought to myself, regretting our lack of foresight. (Not bringing lunch was my biggest regret for the day.) But I also wasn’t super hungry yet. It was still a bit early for lunch. So we pressed ahead. Jaye also found a spot on the map that said it had food.
The next stretch of the trail was one of my highlights of the day. There were almost no people for the entirety of the trail, and we walked along the wooden boardwalk, through the trees, past the incredible blue lakes. (The blue lakes reminded me of 蓝月谷, Lanyuegu in Lijiang, Yunnan. When I asked my friend what made the waters so blue, he replied that it was Gatorade. It does resemble Gatorade, but I’m still not sure exactly why the water is so incredibly blue.) The path crossed little rivers connecting the lakes and everywhere we could see the mountains. My heart was full.
We walked until we reached another waterfall that was one of the highlights of the park (诺日朗瀑布, nuo ri lang pubu). At first, I thought it was just a little waterfall, similar to many of the others that we had passed, but the special thing about this waterfall was that it was so long. The boardwalk led us along the length of a cliff and the water poured down all along the cliff. Every spot was different and beautiful. Toward the beginning, we enjoyed the peacefulness of the waterfall, and the further we went, the more people there were. Apparently, another bus stop was up ahead, and people wandered down along the waterfall, but the biggest crowds were closest to the bus stop.
After enjoying the waterfall for a while, we were starting to get hungry, so Jaye and I decided to press on towards the spot that was supposed to have food. We walked a bit more, and by the time we reached the spot with food, we were very hungry after a full morning of walking and drinking in the beauty of God’s creation.
This part was the worst part of the day. The area had several big buildings, and it was crawling with tourists. People were everywhere. After quite a lot of time away from the crowds, I forgot that there were tens of thousands of people inside this park. And it felt like all of them were there right now. I wondered if we would ever be able to find food, and I also wondered how much money we would have to spend to get food that probably wouldn’t taste very good.
Jaye and I followed the signs to the restaurants and entered the first one that we found. It seemed to be some kind of chicken sandwich/hamburger place. Jaye told me what she wanted and offered to go look for a table. I ordered and prepared to wait for the food for a while. There were people everywhere, but the line wasn’t nearly as long as I expected. The food also appeared on the counter after just a few minutes. I got the tray and headed into the dining area to look for Jaye. I saw her at a table near the back, standing up and waving at me. Wow! What a smooth process! As we prayed, thanking God for our food, I also thanked Him that we had a table and that the food wasn’t too terribly expensive.
The food was better than I expected also. I had a little wrap. It wasn’t great, but it was edible and slightly nourishing, so that was great!
We didn’t linger much because other tourists were walking around searching for empty tables, and workers seemed to be encouraging people to leave once they finished. We enjoyed sitting down while we had the chance, but it was time to leave.
Jaye wanted to get some more hot water so she could make tea, so she had to stand in a line for a long time. The line was long because lots of people had brought instant noodles and needed the hot water to cook their noodles. That’s one advantage to the instant rice—you can just use regular water. I stood nearby, trying and failing to find a place to wait that wasn’t full of people smoking.
We were finally set to head back out to the beauty of nature. We decided to try to take the bus all the way to the top of the mountain and then walk back. A large crowd waited for the bus, but thankfully, the line, or this was more of a crowd than a line, moved quickly, and we soon had seats for the ride up the mountain. We settled in to enjoy the ride up through the beautiful scenery.
We stopped for a few minutes at the next spot, but mostly we wanted to get to the top so we would have time to walk back. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the top of the mountain, we realized that we wouldn’t have time to walk the entire way. I was disappointed because walking along the empty paths between the lakes was my favorite part. But Jaye wanted to make sure that we had time to see the most beautiful and most famous lakes and waterfalls. So we walked part way down and then enjoyed the beauty of the lakes.
At this point, I was starting to get tired, but we still enjoyed these beautiful spots. One lake was bluer than any other lake we had seen. I couldn’t believe the depth of color in nature. It was incredible. At another spot, the path led us down through a waterfall. That sounds weird, but I’m not sure how else to describe it. The ground was covered with rocks, and the water flowed over the rocks all around us. Trees and bushes and moss also covered the rocks, and the path was on top of the rocks, so we could walk down through the waterfall. This was Jaye’s favorite part.
Another waterfall was absolutely incredible. First, we walked along the ridge, and it looked like the water just disappeared. Then we came to some stairs going down the side of the falls, and we could see that the water was disappearing over the edge in a beautiful waterfall. This waterfall was also quite long.
By this point, the paths going between the lakes were closed. Even though the park didn’t close until 6 p.m., they closed these side trails at 4:30 p.m. I was wondering how they would get everyone out, and now I knew. But the buses were still running, and we were still able to get out and see the beautiful places and walk around a bit. But by now there was definitely a time crunch.
I think if I had the chance to go back again, I might go all the way to the top and then work my way down, taking all the connecting paths. I found that as long as we didn’t ride the buses too much, we could avoid most of the crowds. I’m really glad we went on the lower trails first, but I’d like to try some of the other trails on the upper section of the mountain next time.
By the time we got on the bus for the last time, Jaye and I were both completely exhausted. We had walked about 24 kilometers, or around 33,000 steps. And that’s the way to avoid the crowds at Jiuzhaigou. Most of the time, we could enjoy the beautiful scenery all by ourselves even though Jaye found out later that there were around 47,000 tourists in the park that day. Walking everywhere was exhausting, but completely worth it!