Spring Festival 2015 JiuZhaiGou (moved from old blog)

 The Journey to JiuZhaiGou

After finishing work nearly a month ago I have been ready to leave Kunming for a  few days. 

Annoyingly I couldn't leave the city while my new VISA was being processed so as soon as I got my passport back I was booking flights to somewhere, anywhere. So I consulted my "to go to list" and picked a place that was do-able in a  week. 

I picked JiuZhaiGou in Northern SiSchuan, one of China's original UNESCO heritage sites and one of the top 10 places to visit. I flew to ChengDu, a nice 1 hour 10 minute flight, and then booked a bus to JiuZhaiGou, a not so nice 10 hour bus journey. 

I had a few days to kill in ChengDu before my whole day on a bus, so I stocked up on audio books and bus food and headed out. 
We were crammed onto a medium sized bus and started off on an epic journey into the mountains. 

The road has recently been resurfaced so it wasn't bumpy but swingy would be an understatement. The road snaked round the bottom of gorges, along the side of the river and through 10km long tunnels and all the time I was getting more and more impressed by the scenery. I managed to take over 40 photographs just on the journey. 

Once in JiuZhaiGou town, if a string of hotels and restaurants can be called a town, I set off to find the hostel from hostelworld.com. I walked into a beautiful hotel lobby and was fairly certain I had messed up and booked the wrong place. However, the people at reception had me details and I was pointed to the fifth floor. 

The carpet stopped on the fourth floor and the fifth turned out to be the roof and the room I was pointed to, a shed/garage looking thing on the roof. The room had concrete floors and no heating so the electric blankets were just the best thing ever! The bathrooms were across the roof and we had to clamber over pipes and cables to get to some incredible showers, then again after ten hours on a hot and crowded bus any kind of shower would have been amazing. There were six of us in the room and we were all shattered having all just done the epic journey so we were tucked up in bed with a beer by about nine in the evening. Tomorrow to the park!