The Clan's China Adventure, Episode 6: Vacation in Sichuan, Part II - Comparing Natural Scenery

Our long drive now complete, we would spend the next whole day in the magnificent Jiu Zhai Gou national park.

Over the years, I'd been to a number of famous Chinese locations to enjoy its natural splendor and beauty, including Mount Hua of kung-fu novel fame, Mount Huang, the locale where much of Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was filmed, and Sichuan's own Mount Qingcheng. All of these mountain regions have their own special traits; for example, Mount Hua is renowned for its perilous routes and granite peaks, as well as the unique recommended night-time start time. Mount Qingcheng is dotted with dozens of ancient traveler stops and temples of various sizes, and Mount Huang is known for its "Welcoming Tree".

Mount Hua's perilous granite peaks

Mount Qingcheng's name translates to "Green City Mountain", a fitting moniker

Mount Huang is obviously the inspiration for numerous Chinese watercolor paintings!

What all of these previous adventure locales shared (other than the hundreds, nay, thousands of Chinese visitors at the lower parts of the mountains), in my mind, was a sense of China. These mountain regions all felt very Chinese. In fact, when talking about these past trips with my friends, I often tell them that visiting these mountains was very much a revelation for me - Prior to my first trips to China, I always thought that those watercolor paintings were very much stylized by their respective artists rather than realistic depictions of the subject vistas. What these trips made me realize was that, while stylistically beautiful, the paintings are in fact stunningly realistic representations of the actual scenes themselves - the seemingly sculpted stone and trees, the waterfalls, the riverboats, the pagodas, all can be found in the Chinese mountains!

This is, to an extent, what my expectations were prior to entering the Jiu Zhai Gou national park. Alas, what I got rather shocked me. The park is very well maintained (though it is difficult to say whether park maintenance in the other locations has improved in the last decade), but most striking was how un-Chinese it looked. Based on my personal experiences, I thought the park looked very much like the mountains in the western part of the United States (the Rockies, Yosemite, etc.). Some of my European friends on Facebook noted that it reminded them of the Alps. Lush green hills accented by towering rocky snow-capped peaks, with very few man-made structures in between. See the photos below to see what we're talking about:

As magnificent as these naturally beautiful vistas are, just such views alone would have been a bit of a disappointment considering the vast mileage we drove to get to Jiu Zhai Gou. Fortunately, the key selling point of Jiu Zhai Gou is very unique and special indeed. Jiu Zhai Gou's signature draw is in its colorful, crystal clear mirror-like pools of water, nicknamed "seas". I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that one would be hard pressed to find this type of scenery anywhere else in the world. As a bonus, since we went the "high roller route" and paid an extra 240 or so RMB per head to book our very own tour bus, our tour group was able to see a high number of such views during the day - far more than we could have had we gone on foot or waited in line for the "public" buses with the thousands of other visitors!

The aptly-named "Mirror Lake"

The clarity and color of Jiu Zhai Gou's water

A wedding photo-shoot was underway on this leg of the tour

Didn't I say there were lots of Chinese tourists at these parks?

Fire Flower Seas - multiple pools of clear, colorful water in one small location!

Despite Jiu Zhai Gou's lack of "Chinese-ness", its special clear, colorful water and pristine mountain air sets it apart from the other natural parks that I have visited in China!

The Clan's China Adventure, Episode 5: Vacation in Sichuan, Part I

Over the last dozen years, I've traveled to and around China quite a bit and seen quite a few of the famous spots. Shanghai's Bund, the Great Wall, Beijing's Forbidden City and Summer Palace, Xi'an's Terra Cotta Warriors, and Henan's Shaolin Temple are just a few of the examples. But one place had eluded my grasp for years, partially because it used to be so difficult to get to. That place is Sichuan's Jiu Zhai Gou.

A sample of Jiu Zhai Gou's crystal clear, naturally green waters and lush mountains

This vast national park is situated deep in the highlands of Sichuan province and used to take upwards of 12 hours to reach by car from the capital city of Sichuan, Chengdu. To make matters worse, the magnitude 8+ Sichuan earthquake of 2008 essentially cut off access to Jiu Zhai Gou for over a year. Since then, the Chinese government has rebuilt Sichuan provice (or at least part of it), and especially cleaned up the path to Jiu Zhai Gou, one of the most famous natural landscapes in China known in particular for its beautifully clear, yet colorful, "seas" or pools of water.

Now that we live in China, it's a lot easier for us to visit these more difficult to access places. So on the last day of June, 2014, the family headed out to Sichuan to meet up with my mom and dad for a week long tour that would take us into the highlands.

We began our trip in Shanghai, of course, where we, in a nod to the airports of the 70s, boarded a plane that was on the tarmac, decked out in our Gator Gear:

I can hear the Bruce Lee music in the background

A few hours later, we were in Chengdu, where we napped until dinner, attempting to get our rest in preparation for many hours on the road and in the mountains over the next seven days.

Xiao Fang, our hapless tour guide (more on the hapless-ness later)

If only he could have slept like this more often :P

Our drive to the mountains took us right past Wenzhou and Yinxiu, the epicenters of the devastating 2008 earthquake. As you can see in the photos, much of the town of Yinxiu has been built back up. Curiously, someone thought it was a good idea to build a tall apartment building here - of course, there are virtually no buyers of those units...

The rebuilt town of Yinxiu and its empty tall apartment buildings

The drive also took us past a few smaller sights, such as this town which prominently featured Qiang minority castles and a town situated in one of the valleys, which served as a good stopping point to take some photos and use the rather dirty facilities for the price of 1 RMB...

Before long, it was time for our first hike, a hike to a waterfall!

 

We did it!

Next, we would visit an ancient town that is commemorated to the Tang Dynasty princess that is credited with bringing Han Chinese culture to the ethnic Tibetans on the plateau. Notice the beautiful blue skies that are so hard to come by in the city!

With that, we retired to the Holiday Inn resort to prepare for our day inside the Jiu Zhai Gou National Park!